Amanda Lanzillo

Amanda Lanzillo is a historian of modern Islamicate South Asia, working at the intersections of religious history, labor history, and the history of technology. She is also interested in trans-South Asian migration and mobility. Her first book, Pious Labor: Islam, Artisanship, and Technology in Colonial India was published as part of the open access Islamic Humanities series of the University of California Press in 2024. The book examined north Indian Muslim artisans’ claims to emerging technologies and Islamic traditions through printed Urdu-language technical manuals and community histories, c. 1855-1935.

Lanzillo is currently writing a second book on Afghan and Pashtun migration and the limitations of imperial subjecthood across India and the Indian Ocean, c. 1840-1960. Centering understudied Pashto, Persian, and Urdu texts, she argues for archival methodologies that prioritize migrants’ own narratives. This project is supported by an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, as well as by funding from the American Institutes of Indian, Sri Lankan, and Afghanistan studies. Her previous research was supported by Fulbright-Hays, the Library of Congress, AIIS, the American Historical Association, and other funders.

Lanzillo’s on-going projects also include two co-edited journal special issues. The first, “Making Artisans: Artisanal lives and production,” co-edited with Adhitya Dhanapal and Arun Kumar, seeks to disaggregate “artisan” as a historical category in modern South Asia and provide new insight on the experiences of regional artisan communities. The second, “Beyond Received Frameworks: Methodologies of the everyday in South Asian Islam,” co-edited with Harini Kumar, considers varied disciplinary approaches to “the everyday,” and how they might productively inform each other in the study of Islam. Additional research interests include the history of convict labor, print history, and the intersections of science and religious nationalisms in South Asia.

Lanzillo regularly writes for popular publications such as Himal Southasian, The Wire, Scroll, Jamhoor, and Ajam. With Arun Kumar, she is the coauthor of a series of popular articles on South Asian artisans’ laboring histories for The Wire.

Prior to joining the University of Chicago in 2024, she was a Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in the Princeton University Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts and a lecturer in history at Brunel University London.