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About Ahmed Almaazmi

Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult sciences, and the environment across the Western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome.

Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult sciences, and the environment across the Western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome.

Ahmed's website

NBN Episodes hosted by Ahmed:

Indian Ocean World May 29, 2023

Histories of Health and Materiality in the Indian Ocean World

Medicine, Material Culture and Trade, 1600-2000

Anne Gerritsen and Burton Cleetus

Hosted by Ahmed Almaazmi
Histories of Health and Materiality in the Indian Ocean World: Medicine, Material Culture and Trade, 1600-2000 (Bloomsbury, 2023): Introducing materiality into the study of the history of medicine, this volume hones …
Indian Ocean World May 27, 2023

Cargoes in Motion

Materiality and Connectivity Across the Indian Ocean

Burkhard Schnepel and Julia Verne

Hosted by Ahmed Almaazmi
Cargoes in Motion: Materiality and Connectivity Across the Indian Ocean (Ohio University Press, 2022) is an innovative collection of essays that foregrounds specific cargoes as a means to understand connectivity and …
Indian Ocean World May 23, 2023

Seasonal Knowledge and the Almanac Tradition in the Arab Gulf

Daniel Martin Varisco

Hosted by Ahmed Almaazmi
Seasonal Knowledge and the Almanac Tradition in the Arab Gulf (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) is the first in English to survey indigenous knowledge of seasonal, astronomical, and agricultural information in Arab Gulf almanacs …
Indian Ocean World May 22, 2023

Droughts, Floods, and Global Climatic Anomalies in the Indian Ocean World

Philip Gooding

Hosted by Ahmed Almaazmi
Droughts, Floods, and Global Climatic Anomalies in the Indian Ocean World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) explores histories of droughts and floods in the Indian Ocean World, and their connections to broader …
Indian Ocean World May 21, 2023

India in the Indian Ocean World

From the Earliest Times to 1800 CE

Rila Mukherjee

Hosted by Ahmed Almaazmi
India in the Indian Ocean World: From the Earliest Times to 1800 CE (Springer, 2022) integrates the latest scholarly literature on the entire Indian Ocean region, from East Africa to China. Issues …
Indian Ocean World May 20, 2023

Cosmopolitan Cultures and Oceanic Thought

Dilip M Menon and Nishat Zaidi

Hosted by Ahmed Almaazmi
Cosmopolitan Cultures and Oceanic Thought (Routledge, 2023) imagines the ocean as central to understanding the world and its connections in history, literature, and the social sciences. Introducing the central conceptual category …
Indian Ocean World May 16, 2023

The Briny South

Displacement and Sentiment in the Indian Ocean World

Nienke Boer

Hosted by Ahmed Almaazmi
In The Briny South: Displacement and Sentiment in the Indian Ocean World (Duke University Press, 2023), Nienke Boer examines the legal and literary narratives of enslaved, indentured, and imprisoned individuals …
Indian Ocean World April 16, 2023

The Making of Persianate Modernity

Language and Literary History between Iran and India

Alexander Jabbari

Hosted by Ahmed Almaazmi
Alexander Jabbari’s The Making of Persianate Modernity: Language and Literary History between Iran and India (Cambridge University Press, 2023) narrates the cultural and literary history of one of the world's …
Indian Ocean World October 24, 2022

Under Empire

Muslim Lives and Loyalties Across the Indian Ocean World, 1775–1945

Michael Francis Laffan

Hosted by Ahmed Almaazmi
Michael Francis Laffan’s Under Empire: Muslim Lives and Loyalties Across the Indian Ocean World, 1775–1945 (Columbia University Press, 2022) traces a tapestry of historical actors, empires, and ideas across the …
Indian Ocean World January 28, 2021

Imperial Mecca

Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hajj

Michael Christo Low

Hosted by Ahmed Almaazmi
With the advent of the steamship, repeated outbreaks of cholera marked oceanic pilgrimages to Mecca as a dangerous form of travel and a vehicle for the globalization of epidemic diseases …
Environmental Studies January 25, 2021

Scorched Earth

Environmental Warfare as a Crime Against Humanity and Nature

Emmanuel Kreike

Hosted by Ahmed Almaazmi
In Scorched Earth: Environmental Warfare as a Crime Against Humanity and Nature (Princeton UP, 2021), Emmanuel Kreike offers a global history of environmental warfare and makes the case for why it should …
Anthropology January 20, 2021

Channeling Moroccanness

Language and the Media of Sociality

Becky L. Schulthies

Hosted by Ahmed Almaazmi
What does it mean to connect as a people through mass media? This book approaches that question by exploring how Moroccans engage communicative failure as they seek to shape social …
Indian Ocean World January 11, 2021

The Impoverishment of the African Red Sea Littoral, 1640–1945

Steven Serels

Hosted by Ahmed Almaazmi
The African Red Sea Littoral, currently divided between Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Djibouti, is one of the poorest regions in the world. But the pastoralist communities indigenous to this region …
Indian Ocean World December 31, 2020

Narrating Africa in South Asia

South Asian History and Culture, Volume 11, Issue 4, 2020

Mahmood Kooria, Khatija Khader, and Sofia Péquignot

Hosted by Ahmed Almaazmi
Narrating Africa in South Asia (Special Journal Issue: South Asian History and Culture, Volume 11, Issue 4, 2020) explores the multifaceted and longue durée history of the African diaspora in …
Indian Ocean World December 24, 2020

The Blue Frontier

Maritime Vision and Power in the Qing Empire

Ronald C. Po

Hosted by Ahmed Almaazmi
In this revisionist history of the eighteenth-century Qing Empire from a maritime perspective, Ronald C. Po argues that it is reductive to view China over this period exclusively as a …
Indian Ocean World December 21, 2020

Land and Maritime Empires in the Indian Ocean

Beatrice Nicolini and Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya

Hosted by Ahmed Almaazmi
Land and Maritime Empires in the Indian Ocean (Educatt, 2017) reconceptualizes the history of the Indian Ocean through the themes of mobility, encounters, empires, and slavery. The book aims to …
Indian Ocean World December 14, 2020

Making Identity on the Swahili Coast

Urban Life, Community, and Belonging in Bagamoyo

Steven Fabian

Hosted by Ahmed Almaazmi
Situated at a crossroads of trade in the late nineteenth century, and later the economic capital of German East Africa, the thriving caravan and port town of Bagamoyo, Tanzania is …
Indian Ocean World December 3, 2020

Islamic Sufi Networks in the Western Indian Ocean (c.1880-1940)

Ripples of Reform

Anne K. Bang

Hosted by Ahmed Almaazmi
In the period c. 1880-1940, organized Sufism spread rapidly in the western Indian Ocean. New communities turned to Islam, and Muslim communities turned to new texts, practices, and religious leaders …
Indian Ocean World October 19, 2020

The Making of an Indian Ocean World-Economy, 1250–1650

Princes, Paddy fields, and Bazaars

Ravi Palat

Hosted by Ahmed Almaazmi
Ravi Palat’s The Making of an Indian Ocean World-Economy, 1250–1650: Princes, Paddy fields, and Bazaars (Palgrave, 2015) counters eurocentric notions of long-term historical change by drawing upon the histories of …
Indian Ocean World October 12, 2020

The Red Sea In Search of Lost Space

Alexis Wick

Hosted by Ahmed Almaazmi
The Red Sea has, from time immemorial, been one of the world’s most navigated spaces, in the pursuit of trade, pilgrimage and conquest. Yet this multidimensional history remains largely unrevealed …
Indian Ocean World October 5, 2020

Swahili Port Cities

The Architecture of Elsewhere

Prita Meier

Hosted by Ahmed Almaazmi
On the Swahili coast of East Africa, monumental stone houses, tombs, and mosques mark the border zone between the interior of the African continent and the Indian Ocean. In Swahili …
Indian Ocean World September 28, 2020

Banishment and Belonging

Exile and Diaspora in Sarandib, Lanka and Ceylon

Ronit Ricci

Hosted by Ahmed Almaazmi
Lanka, Ceylon, Sarandib: merely three disparate names for a single island? Perhaps. Yet the three diverge in the historical echoes, literary cultures, maps and memories they evoke. Names that have …
Indian Ocean World September 17, 2020

Malik Ambar

Power and Slavery across the Indian Ocean

Omar H. Ali

Hosted by Ahmed Almaazmi
Omar H. Ali’s Malik Ambar: Power and Slavery across the Indian Ocean (Oxford University Press, 2016), provides insight into the life of slave soldier Malik Ambar. It offers a rare …
Indian Ocean World September 14, 2020

Imperial Connections

India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860-1920

Thomas R. Metcalf

Hosted by Ahmed Almaazmi
Thomas R. Metcalf’s Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860-1920 (University of California Press) is an innovative remapping of empire. Imperial Connections offers a broad-ranging view of the …