Bar Sadeh, Roy

Field: International & Global History; Advisor: Elshakry and Rao; Year: 2015

Roy Bar Sadeh is a Ph.D. candidate in the International and Global History track and the Institute for Comparative Literature & Society at Columbia University. His research focuses on notions of Muslim minority and their intellectual and socio-political histories that link Islamic modernists throughout Eurasia and the Indian Ocean. He examines how Islamic modernists across the British, Tsarist and Soviet Empires confronted, and redefined their categorization as “minority” by modern empires and emerging nation-states. Drawing on Arabic, Urdu, Russian, Persian, Hebrew, and English sources, Roy explores how these Muslim intellectuals connected with and contributed to ongoing global debates about minority and emancipation. His broader research interests include Islamic thought and law, relations between Islamic reform and daily practices in the Mashriq, Indian subcontinent, and Russian Empire/Soviet Union, comparative nationalisms and empires, as well as interdisciplinary approaches to intellectual history. Roy earned both his B.A. (2013) and M.A. (2015) summa cum laude from Tel Aviv University, where he majored in Middle Eastern and African Studies. He was the co-organizer of Columbia’s “International History Workshop” (2016-2018), the “South-South Workshop: Intellectual History across the Middle East and South Asia, 1857- 1948 (2016),” and the “Minority Questions Workshop (2018)."

Publications

“Debating Gandhi in al-Manar during the 1920s and 1930s.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 38, no. 3 (2018): 491–507.

“Islamic Modernism between Colonialism and Orientalism: Al-Manar's Intellectual Circles and Aligarh's Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College, 1898-1914.” In The Muslim Reception of European Orientalism: Reversing the Gaze, edited by Susannah Heschel and Amr Ryad, 103-128. London: Routledge (Forthcoming, January 2019).