About the authors

David Boyk is Associate Professor of Instruction in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at Northwestern University. His research interests include South Asian urban and regional history, Bollywood cinema, food studies, and the history of Hindi-Urdu language and literature. His publications include Provincial Metropolis: Intellectuals and the Hinterland in Colonial India (Cambridge University Press, 2025), a study of Patna, in the north Indian region of Bihar, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Daniel Majchrowicz is Associate Professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at Northwestern University. He is a scholar of South Asian literature, history, and culture. He is particularly fascinated by the history and culture of Muslims and Islam in South Asia. His work is committed to thinking about South Asia and its place in the world as it is envisaged, imagined, and expressed through language and literature, particularly in Hindi and Urdu. His publications include The World in Words: Travel Writing and the Global Imagination in Muslim South Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2023), a study of South Asia’s global imagination as it was expressed in Urdu-language travel writing from 1840 to the present.

The authors are currently working on an annotated translation of Qāzī Abdul Ġhaffār’s short story collection Ajīb, under the title The Ajeeb Society.