Biography:

Zak Leonard is a PhD candidate in the history department at the University of Chicago, specializing in modern South Asia, Britain, and empire. Prior to coming to Chicago, he received a MSc from Edinburgh University and a BA from Brown University. His published research includes an article for the Historical Journal detailing methodological shifts in colonial ethnography on India’s North-West Frontier following the advent of sociocultural evolutionism. He has also contributed a book chapter to a forthcoming collected volume that reassesses the career of Scottish scholar-administrator Mountstuart Elphinstone. This piece suggests that colonial ethnographers and metropolitan reformers invoked Muslim “fanaticism” as a polemical device to substantiate divergent theories of native political development.

Abstract:

His present dissertation project analyzes the activity of Victorian India reform organizations that challenged “anomalous” modes of colonial rule. Chapters examine pressure group competition and link-ups, forms of imperial constitutionalism, the utilization of law of nations theory and international law in the defense of princely sovereignty, and the reformers’ alternative conceptualizations of colonial political economy.  In addition to his research, Zak has taught lecture courses, supervised BA thesis projects, and co-organized a recent conference on colonial frontiers and borderlands.