Short answers, pulled from the story.
Muzaffar Alam is the George V. Bobrinskoy Professor in South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, born on the 3rd of February 1947. He is known for his scholarship on Mughal political and institutional history, the history of Indo-Islamic culture, and the role of Persian as a language of power in precolonial India.
Alam was trained at Jamia Millia Islamia and Jawaharlal Nehru University, both in New Delhi, and at Aligarh Muslim University. He received his doctorate in history from Jawaharlal Nehru University in 1977.
The Languages of Political Islam in India: c. 1200-1800, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2004, examines how rulers and scholars in South Asia constructed political legitimacy through Islamic legal and literary language across six centuries of Islamic governance, from the Delhi Sultanate through the Mughal Empire.
Alam co-authored three major works with Sanjay Subrahmanyam: The Mughal State 1526-1750 (Oxford University Press, 1998), Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discovery: 1400-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and Writing the Mughal World: Studies on Culture and Politics (Columbia University Press, 2011).
His most recent monograph is The Mughals and the Sufis: Islam and Political Imagination in India, 1500-1750, published by SUNY Press in 2021. It examines two and a half centuries of interaction between Mughal imperial authority and Sufi networks in South Asia.
Alam joined the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago in 2001, after spending three decades teaching at the Centre for Historical Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University.