Mahbub ul Haq Research Centre at LUMS

Ali Raza, Associate Professor, is a historian of South Asia. He received his DPhil from the University of Oxford and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin. His research and teaching interests include the social and intellectual history of South Asia, comparative colonialisms, anti-colonialism/decolonization, and post-colonial theory.

Raza is the author of Revolutionary Pasts: Communist Internationalism in Colonial India (Cambridge University Press, 2020). His book narrates the lives, geographies, dreams, and anti-colonial struggles of Indian revolutionaries and how they sought to remake the world. South Asian editions of Revolutionary Pasts appeared in Pakistan and India with Folio Books (2021) and Tulika Books (2022) respectively. The book was also shortlisted for the Royal Historical Society's Gladstone Book Prize and the Karwaan Book Award. 

Raza is also the co-editor of The Internationalist Moment: South Asia, Worlds, and World Views, 1917-39 (Sage, 2015). The Internationalist Moment offers a collection of essays that look at South Asia's political, social, and intellectual engagements with the wider world between the Bolshevik Revolution and the onset of the Second World War. In addition, his work has appeared in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East; South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies; Itinerario; South Asian History and Culture; and Contemporary South Asia as well as numerous edited volumes and other publications. His writings can be accessed here. 

In addition to his other scholarly and pedagogical commitments, Raza is also the co-founder and co-curator of the LUMS Digital Archive. The archive and its digital history projects can be accessed here.

For the academic year 2022-23, Raza is a Member of the School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.