Profile
Layli joined QMUL as a Lecturer in Politics and International Relations of South Asia in September 2021. She is a political and social historian of modern South Asia, bringing together interdisciplinary questions on religion, class and mass politics. Her research reconstructs subaltern political thought and movements in the context of decolonisation, state-formation and the Cold War. Her broader interests are in liberation theologies and subaltern geopolitics in the Global South.
Before joining as Lecturer, she was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at SPIR, QMUL and prior to that at the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London (2020-2021). Layli was also a Postdoctoral Fellow at Lahore University of Management Sciences (2019), and Curator of Two Centuries of Indian Print at the British Library (2016-2018).
Layli completed her PhD in History at Royal Holloway, University of London, in 2016. Her dissertation explored the political mobilisation of subaltern classes in the making and unmaking of Pakistan from the 1930s up to 1971. She is currently working on her first book based on the PhD, Land of Eternal Eid: Making and Unmaking Pakistan, 1930s-1971.
She is on the advisory board of Jamhoor, a critical left media organisation; Bangladesh on Record, a digital archive project; Lokayoto Bidyaloy, a campaign and advocacy group in Bangladesh, and Oitij-Jo, a local women-led Bangladeshi cultural and creative arts organisation in East London.
She blogs at layliuddin.wordpress.com.
Co-Director of QMUL South Asia Forum
Teaching
POL319: Politics of South Asia (Semester A)
POL320: Politics of South Asia – Independent Research (Semester B)
Research
Research Interests:
My research brings the history of political thought into conversation with sociology of religion and anthropology. In particular, I am interested in subaltern geopolitics; emancipatory politics; internationalism; social movements, Islam; Marxism; and microhistory. My work is across India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.
I am currently working on two projects. My first book, Land of Eternal Eid, offers an alternative account of the formation of Bangladesh, focusing on the political mobilisation of poor peasants and urban working and their relationship to the subaltern leader, and an unusually powerful Sufi saint, Maulana Bhashani from the 1930s up to 1971. I am also working on my Leverhulme project ‘Red Islam in South Asia’, a transnational study of Islamic Socialism from the 1919 Khilafat movement up to the 1978 Soviet-Afghan war. By tracing the travels of radical South Asian Sufi saints and their socialist experiments and struggles in Khyber Pakhtunwa, Bihar, and Bengal, I demonstrate how South Asian Islam connected to Bolshevik Russia, Maoist China, and Castro’s Cuba.
Examples of research funding:
2023-2024. Planning Grant. UCLA Modern Endangered Archives Program.
2020-2023. Early Career Fellowship, Leverhulme Trust
2014-2015. Scouloudi Fellowship, Institute of Historical Research, London
2012-2013. Kluge Fellowship, John W. Kluge Centre, Library of Congress
2011-2014. PhD Scholarship, Arts and Humanities Research Council
2009-2011. Tun Mahathir Mohamad Scholarship, The Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, Oxford University
Awards:
2018. Shortlisted for BRAIS-De Gruyter Prize 2018, awarded for best doctoral thesis in the study of Islam and the Muslim World, Apr 2018
2016. Honorable Mention for S.S Pirzada Dissertation Prize, Institute of South Asia Studies, University of California, Berkeley
Publications
Journal articles:
Uddin, L. (2023). Red Maulanas: Revisiting Islam and the Left in twentieth-century South Asia. History Compass, 21(11), e12787. https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12787
Uddin, L. (2023). Casteist demons and working-class prophets: Subaltern Islam in Bengal, circa 1872–1928. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1-25. doi:10.1017/S1356186323000366
Sobers-Khan, N., Uddin, L., & Basu, P. (2023). Beyond Colonial Rupture: Print Culture and the Emergence of Muslim Modernity in Nineteenth-Century South Asia. International Journal of Islam in Asia, 3(1-2), 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1163/25899996-20230010
Dirik, D., Younis, M., Chehonadskih, M., Uddin, L., & Davidson, M. (2023). The Meanings of Internationalism: A Collective Discussion on Pan-African, Early Soviet, Islamic Socialist and Kurdish Internationalisms Across the 20th Century. Millennium, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/03058298231175700
Uddin, L., & Hoek, L. (2022). On the margins of the USIS archive in South Asia: Histories of media and politics. The Journal of e-Media Studies, 6(1), 1-4. https://doi.org/10.1349/PS1.1938-6060.A.484
Uddin, L. (2022). A View From The Roof: Space and Politics in South Asia. Issues, 3(1), https://doi.org/10.51142/issues-journal-3-1-1
Uddin, L. (2021). ‘Enemy Agents at Work’: A microhistory of the 1954 Adamjee and Karnaphuli riots in East Pakistan. Modern Asian Studies, 55(2), 629-664. doi:10.1017/S0026749X19000416
Sunder, D., & Uddin, L. (2007). A Comparative Analysis of Bangladeshi and Pakistani Educational Attainment in London Secondary Schools. InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 3(2). http://dx.doi.org/10.5070/D432000605
Special Issue:
Sobers-Khan, N., Uddin, L., & Basu, P. (2023). Beyond Colonial Rupture: Print Culture and the Emergence of Muslim Modernity in Nineteenth-Century South Asia. International Journal of Islam in Asia, 3(1-2), 1-227
Book chapters:
Uddin, L. (2021). ‘Kagmari Festival, 1957: Political Aesthetics and Subaltern Internationalism in Pakistan’. In Forms of the Left in Postcolonial South Asia: Aesthetics, Networks and Connected Histories, edited by Lotte Hoek and Sanjukta Sunderason. London: Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 65-96
Book reviews:
2018 ‘The Makers and Shakers of India.’ (Review of Sunil Khilnani, Incarnations: India in 50 Lives.) History Workshop Journal, 85:1, pp. 345–351.
2011 Review of Jamal J. Elias’s ‘On Wings of Diesel: Trucks, Identity and Culture in Pakistan’, Ceasefire, 27/04/2011
Translations:
Layli Uddin & Mir Rifat Us-Saleheen. Shahidul Zahir’s ‘Woodcutter and Crows’, Samovar, June 2018.
Journalism:
2020. We are the 95%: Bhashani and Kagmari Festival. Daily Star, Bangladesh.
2020. (Mao)-Lana Bhashani and Malcolm X: A Secret Revolutionary History. Raiot, India.
2018 ‘Mao-Lana Bhashani of Assam, Bengal, Pakistan and Bangladesh’, Raiot, India.
2018 ‘Mao-Lana Bhashani: Maoism and the unmaking of Pakistan’, Jamhoor.
2015 ‘Maulana Bhashani: The Lessons of Freedom’, Daily Star, Bangladesh.
Regular blogs on layliuddin.wordpress.com
Supervision
Layli is interested in supervising students working on social and political histories of South Asia; Islam; social movements; agrarian and labour politics; and histories of resistance & marginalisation.
Public Engagement
She is on the advisory board of Jamhoor, a critical left media organisation; Bangladesh on Record, a digital archive project; and for Lokayoto Bidyaloy, a campaign and advocacy group in Bangladesh.
She blogs at layliuddin.wordpress.com.
