Siraj Dean Ahmed

Assistant Professor of English

Specialization
Literature, imperialism, and the Enlightenment; postcolonial literature and film, particularly Anglophone and Francophone; critical theory and continental philosophy from the Enlightenment forward; post-fascist Italian literature and film

Professor Ahmed was a President's Fellow and a Whiting Fellow at Columbia and a Benjamin Franklin Scholar at Penn. Since coming to Mount Holyoke in 2004, he has received yearlong and summer fellowships from the NEH, a research fellowship from the Clark Library and Center for Seventeenth & Eighteenth Century Studies at UCLA, and honorary fellowships from both the Institute of English Studies and the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at the University of London. He has taught courses at the Santa Chiara Study Center in Castiglion Fiorentino, Italy and has presented his work at Berkeley, UCLA, USC, Santa Barbara, Indiana, Vanderbilt, Georgetown, the School of Advanced Study London, the Yale Mellon Center for Art London, the University of Córdoba, and the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He has received an excellence in teaching award and was chosen by the Mount Holyoke Class of '07 to speak at its Baccalaureate ceremony.

Professor Ahmed's research takes place at the intersection of the Enlightenment and Postcolonial Studies. His book project—`The Stillbirth of Capital: Enlightenment Form & Colonial India'—reconsiders the shared origins of modern imperialism and modern literature. It argues that we need to see the former as the unleashing not of capital, but rather of modern warfare, and that precisely this anti-progressive vision informed Enlightenment thought. Working outward from the Enlightenment and Postcolonial Studies, Professor Ahmed's teaching ranges back to ancient texts, both European and non-European, and forward to contemporary continental philosophy. He is planning a second book that will tie these interests together, setting out from the Enlightenment fascination with `pre-historical' writing to think more carefully the present imperative that literature and philosophy become dialectical practices beyond progress.

Selected Publications

'Orientalism and the Permanent Fix of War' in The Postcolonial Enlightenment, ed. Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

'"The Power to Lend Money without Extracting Interest": Renegade Capitalism in Late Eighteenth-Century British India' in Interpreting Colonialism, ed. Byron Wells and Philip Stewart, a volume in the SVEC series (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2004).

'The Theater of the Civilized Self: Edmund Burke and the East India Trials,' Representations 78 (Spring 2002), 28-55.

'"The Pure Soil of Universal Benevolence": the Rule of Property and the Rise of an Imperial Ideology in the 1790s,' Eighteenth-Century Ireland 15 (2000), 139-157.

'"An Unlimited Intercourse": Historical Contradictions and Imperial Romance in the Early Nineteenth Century,' in The Containment and Re-Deployment of English India, ed. Daniel O'Quinn, a volume in the Romantic Circles Praxis Series (U. of Maryland, 2000).