UMass Boston

Islam in South Asia; literature and history of Bengal and Bangladesh; Sufism; Islamic art; translation studies, Middle Bangla Codicology

PhD with distinction, University of Pennsylvania, 2011
Masters in South Asia Studies, University of Pennsylvania, 2004.
Masters in Social Work, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India, 1992.
Bachelor of Arts in Sanskrit, with honors, Elphinstone College, University of Mumbai, Mumbai, India, 1990.

• BOOKS
• The Muhammad Avatāra: Salvation History, Translation, and the Making of Bengali Islam, New York: Oxford University Press, 456 pp., 2021. Finalist, American Academy of Religion’s 2021 Book Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion, Analytical-Descriptive Studies.
• South Asia Edition: Oxford University Press, 2021.
• New Books in Indian Religions, interview with Raj Balkaran, podcast published on April 14, 2021.
• ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS
• "The Propitious Rise of the Seka: Reimagining the Islamic Conquest of Bengal,” in Routledge Handbook of Hindu-Muslim Relations, edited by Peter Gottschalk. Under review.
• "One Saint, Two Tombs: Memory, History, and Materiality in the Pīr-Cults of Bangladesh,” in “Death Matters: Samādhis, Dargāhs and Relics in South Asia,” a special issue edited by Brian Hatcher, Abhishek Amar, and Mark McLaughlin, The Journal of Hindu Studies, 14 (1): 27–58, May 2021
• "Curbing Moses’ Hubris: Khoyāj Khijir’s Instruction to Musā in the Bengali Nabīvaṃśa of Saiyad Sultān,” in Stewart, Tony K. with contributions from Ayesha A. Irani, The Needle at the Bottom of the Sea: Bengali Tales from the Land of the Eighteen Tides, Berkeley CA: University California Press, forthcoming 2022. A translation with introduction, co-authored with Tony K. Stewart.
• "From Manuscript to Print: Islamic Bangla Literature and the Politics of the Archive,” Religions of South Asia 12 (3): 351–381, 2018.
• "Authorship, Reception, and Memory in Early Modern Bengal: Songs Attributed to Saiyad Sultān,” ReOrient: The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies, 5 (2):198–232, 2020. Special Issue edited by Teena Purohit and SherAli Tareen, “Beyond Revival and Reform: Reorienting the Study of South Asian Islam.
• "Into the Inky Fray: A Premodern Pīr-Poet and the Politics of Bangladesh’s Regional Scholarship,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, 64 (1):107–145, June 2019.
• "Love’s New Pavilions: Śāhā Mohāmmad Chagīr’s Retelling of Yūsuf va Zulaykhā in Early Modern Bengal.” In Jāmī in Regional Contexts: The Reception of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī’s Works in the Islamicate World, ca. 9th/15th–14th/20th Century, edited by Thibaut d’Hubert and Alexandre Papas, 692–751. In the series “Handbook of Oriental Studies (Handbuch der Orientalistik),” Section One, Volume 128, edited by Maribel Fierro, M. Sukru Hanioglu, Renata Holod, and Florian Schwarz. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2018.
• "The Prophetic Principle of Light and Love: Nūr Muḥammad in Early Modern Bengali Literature.” History of Religions 55 (4):391–428, 2016. Special Issue edited by Wendy Doniger, “Muslim-Hindu Literary Encounters in Early Modern South Asia: Conversations with Aditya Behl.
• "Mystical Love, Prophetic Compassion, and Ethics: An Ascension Narrative in the Medieval Bengali Nabīvaṃśa of Saiyad Sultān.” In The Prophet’s Ascension: Cross-Cultural Encounters with the Islamic Miʿrāj Tales, edited by Christiane Gruber and Frederick Colby, 225-251. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.
• REFERENCE WORKS AND REVIEWS
• "Saiyad Sultān.” In Islam, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism. Encyclopedia of Indian Religions. Edited by Z. R. Kassam, Y. K. Greenberg, and J. Bagli, 590–594. Springer, Dordecht, 2018.
• "Turcoman Colonization of the Ottoman ‘Wild West’: A review of Imperial Expansion, Colonization, and Conversion to Islam in the Islamic World’s ‘Wild West’: The Formation of the Muslim Community in Ottoman Deliorman (N. E. Balkans), 15th–16th CC., by Nikolay Antov,” Dissertation Reviews, May 29, 2013:, 6 pp.

Ayesha Irani is a scholar of Islam in South Asia, with a particular interest in the early modern Islamic Bangla literature of Bengal and Arakan. 

Her first monograph, The Muhammad Avatāra: Salvation History, Translation, and the Making of Bengali Islam, examines the role of vernacular translation in the Islamization of Bengal, through a close reading of the seventeenth-century Nabīvaṃśa (“The Prophet’s Lineage”), the first major work to translate Islamic doctrine for Bengalis into their mother-tongue. Her next major research project involves recovering the many faces of the Bengali fakir, as portrayed in their own writings and as viewed by multiple early modern and colonial actors. She is also simultaneously working on another project that examines Prabhāta Saṃgīta, the 5019 songs composed by Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar (1921–1990), an extraordinary spiritual master from West Bengal.

Ayesha Irani received her PhD in South Asia Studies (with distinction) from the University of Pennsylvania in 2011. In 2012–13, she was a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. From 2013–15, she was Assistant Professor of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto, before joining UMass Boston. She has received a number of fellowships, honors, and awards. As a doctoral student, she received the Charlotte W. Newcombe and Briton Martin Dissertation Fellowships, as well as FLAS and Penn awards. Her dissertation was a finalist for the International Convention of Asia Scholars Best PhD in the Humanities Prize in 2013. In 2013-15 she was part of an international team working to preserve manuscripts of the Rāmamālā Library, Comilla, Bangladesh, funded by the Endangered Archives Programme of the British Library. At the University of Toronto, she received the Connaught New Researcher Award in 2014, and the Endowed Faculty Career Development Award at UMass Boston in 2016–17. In 2018-19, she was a recipient of an American Institute of Indian Studies Senior Short-Term Fellowship. In 2021–22, she held the Patricia Crone Membership in Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. From 2019–2021, she served as a Steering Committee Member on Religion in South Asia (RISA), now known as South Asian Religions (SARI) of the American Academy of Religions. She serves as a member of the South Asia Council, Association for Asian Studies, 2021–2023, and serves as UMB’s representative and member of the Board of Trustees of the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies since 2018.