Skip to main content

Daniel Majchrowicz

Associate Professor of South Asian Literature and Culture

Ph.D., Harvard University
Curriculum Vitae

I am a scholar of South Asian literature, history, and culture with a particular focus on the history and culture of South Asian Muslims, both within South Asia and across the globe. My main research languages are Urdu, Hindi, Indonesian, Arabic, and Persian.

I am co-director of the South Asia Research Forum and a Kaplan-funded research workshop called The Language of Islam (With Usman Hamid). Beyond Northwestern, I am vice-president of the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, and a board member of the Modern Endangered Archives Program.

Current Projects

I recently completed The Ajeeb Society, a translation from Urdu of supernatural short stories by Qazi Abdul Ghaffar (with David Boyk, Northwestern University Press, 2027), winner of the 2026 Humanities in Translation Prize.

I am currently working on a book titled The Woman Who Would Rule Mecca: The Pilgrimage Narrative of an Indian Queen, which is based on the recently discovered manuscript copy of the Urdu original of the first prose travel account written by a Muslim woman. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book locates Sikandar Begum and her journey in the imperial politics of the mid-nineteenth century Middle East. Arguing that this work gives us an unparalleled picture of Indian religious practices in the nineteenth-century-Hijaz and aims to give new insight to scholars of South Asia while introducing it more widely to readers interested in Middle Eastern history and colonial politics.  The book serves as a companion to another volume, now in press, Nawab Sikandar begum ka Pahla Niswani Safarnama "Tarikh-e Safar-e Makka": Asal Nuskha ka Mustanad Tahqiqi Edition (Dilli Kitab Ghar, 2026).

Earlier projects

My first book was The World in Words: Travel Writing and the Global Imagination in Muslim South Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2023), a study of South Asia’s global imagination as it was expressed in Urdu-language travel writing from 1840 to the present. This book argues that travel writing in South Asia was a broadly ecumenical genre that let Indian travelers not just describe the world as they found it, but to imagine it as they wished for it to be. 

Three Centuries of Travel Writing by Muslim Women (Indiana University Press, 2022), co-written and edited with Siobhan Lambert-Hurley and Sunil Sharma, was the recipient of a three-year grant from the Leverhulme Foundation. It argues that travel was a key site at which Muslim women negotiated their relationship to Islam and the Muslim community and contains original studies of travel accounts, including translated excerpts, by forty-five women authors written in twelve languages.

My third book, A Journey to Mecca and London: The Travels of an Indian Muslim Woman, 1909–1910 (Indiana University Press, 2025), reveals the fascinating life story of Begum Sarbuland Jung, an influential Muslim woman who lived at the very heart of one India’s wealthiest kingdoms, but who never herself stepped into the spotlight. Included in the book is a full English translation of her nearly-lost Urdu travel diary of a journey to the Middle East and Europe.

I have also published articles and translations in a range of academic journals and edited volumes. I am also author, with David Boyk, of e-book on the Urdu script entitled Zer o Zabar.

Books