Asia Lecture Series

Upcoming Lectures

The Asian Studies Program Annual Lecture Series speaker for Fall 2025 is Dr. Elizabeth Lhost (UCLA Library). Dr. Lhost's talk, "Looking For Justice in all the Right Places: Archives of Islamic Law in Modern South Asia" will take place Monday November 3rd at 1 pm in the Signal Mountain Room, Room 312, University Center.

Abstract:

During the colonial period, Islamic law in South Asia underwent profound change. Some of these changes were forced upon Muslims by the British colonial state. Others were ushered in by Muslim scholars and jurists adapting to changing political and social circumstances. All of them had a lasting impact on Muslim legal life. Looking across the 19th and early 20th centuries, this talk will survey major changes in the scope and substance of Islamic law during this period. It will then zoom in to understand how Islamic legal practitioners—and the Muslim communities they served—made sense of colonial legal change using the archives they created. Postcards, letters, and telegrams are a few examples of the documents they left behind. Calling upon this rich archive of handwritten, unpublished materials, this talk will excavate the archival traces of Islamic legal practice in 20th century South Asia to show how ordinary individuals made use of the legal pathways open to them.

Elizabeth Lhost is a historian of modern South Asia and the author of Everyday Islamic Law and the Making of Modern South Asia (University of North Carolina Press, 2022). Her research and writing have been supported by the American Institute of Indian Studies, the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship Program, the Social Science Research Council, the Mellon Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. She is currently Program Manager for the Modern Endangered Archives Program at the University of California, Los Angeles Library where she works to safeguard and preserve cultural heritage materials from around the world.