ABOUT HIM
Maidul Islam is a Political Scientist at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. Previously, he has taught Political Science at Presidency University, Kolkata and at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences. He was also a Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. As a Clarendon-Hector Pilling-Senior Hulme scholar at Brasenose College, he studied political theory for his doctoral studies in the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford. His doctoral thesis at Oxford University was published as Limits of Islamism: Jamaat-e-Islami in Contemporary India and Bangladesh (Cambridge University Press, 2015). His second book, Indian Muslim(s) after Liberalization (Oxford University Press, 2019; Ebook, 2018) is a companion volume to Limits of Islamism by looking at the socio-economic conditions and political expressions of the largest religious minorities in the world’s largest electoral democracy. His third book, Political Theory and South Asian Counter-Narratives (Routledge, 2022; Ebook, 2021) evaluates the promise of human progress and secularism in grand political narratives of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, comparing counter-narratives of South Asia within the context of a fast-changing twenty-first century. Besides being an accomplished scholar in the discipline of Political Science with contributions in the field of political theory and South Asian politics, he has also written on the overlap between socio-political issues and popular cinema. As a public intellectual, he occasionally writes for newspapers and digital platforms in both English and Bengali. As a political analyst, he occasionally appears for Bengali news channels and gives expert opinions on Indian and West Bengal politics to various national and international media houses.