Aisha Valiulla
CCHS Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellow
Interests
Geographic Field(s): Middle Eastern and North African History; Asian History; Global History
Thematic Field(s): Environmental History; Urban History
Principal Research Interest(s): History of medieval Indian Ocean world, Islamic knowledge production, literary history
Biography
Aisha Valiulla specializes in cultural exchange, knowledge production, and literary culture in the medieval Indian Ocean and Indo-Islamic world. In her dissertation, titled “Sailors, Scholars, and Wonders: Arabic Scholarship and the Indian Ocean World, 900—1400,” she analyzes Arabic and Persian histories, geographies, and merchant accounts to trace the transition of the Islamic world into the Indo-Islamic world and the centrality of travel accounts in the textual conceptualization of India. She teaches classes on medieval Islamic history, history of travel, and history of medieval and modern South Asia.
She is an award-winning teacher, having won the Northwestern History Department’s Lacey Baldwin Smith Prize for Teaching Excellence in 2020 and the Weinberg College Graduate Teaching Award in 2023. She holds a PhD in History from Northwestern University and an MA in English Literature from Virginia Commonwealth University.