Hasan Hameed studies Islam, gender, and Persian literature in early modern and modern South Asia. His dissertation project explores debates over ethics and erotics in 19^th century India by examining the reception of classical Persian literature in the age of British colonialism. Given the historical enmeshment of Persian literature within standard Islamic curricula, changing attitudes toward the former profoundly influenced the meaning of ‘Islam’ as a discursive tradition and lived reality. Accordingly, his dissertation is titled, ‘Ethics and Erotics: The reception of Persian literature and the remaking of Islam in colonial India.’

At Princeton, Hasan has been awarded a Graduate Prize Fellowship by the Center for Culture, Society, and Religion (CCSR). He has also been part of the CCSR media team, helping in the production of essays and videos that make scholarship on religion accessible to a public audience. Previously, he served as a Graduate Fellow at Princeton University’s Writing Center, and as a Resident Graduate Student (RGS) at Forbes College, one of Princeton’s seven residential colleges for undergraduates. He also co-founded a reading group, ‘Islam after Liberalism’, sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Program in the Humanities.

Before coming to Princeton, Hasan completed a master’s degree in South Asian Studies from the University of Oxford, where he was the Vicky Noon Scholar from Pakistan. His master’s thesis, currently being revised for publication, situated pre-partition debates between Indian Muslim religious scholars (‘ulama) on the question of Pakistan within larger debates in anti-colonial political thought. At Oxford, Hasan also served as a workshop facilitator for the Good Lad Initiative, and as the Welfare and Equality officer for Linacre College.

Hasan has a passion for communicating academic scholarship to public audiences. Therefore, in addition to academic journals such as the Orientalistische Literaturzeitung, his writings have appeared in public-facing platforms such as The Friday Times and The Marginalia Review of Books. He has also written on issues of local concern for regional publications such as The Daily Princetonian and The Nassau Weekly.

Hasan has also been invited to give talks at various academic and public venues in the US and Pakistan. In addition to speaking at Princeton University’s Muslim Monologues, he has delivered lectures on Muslim masculinity and the self in modernity and Islam as represented in popular Hollywood movies. One of his Urdu speeches, a critique of systemic corruption in the Pakistani state, was aired on national television and garnered more than thirty thousand views on YouTube.

Beyond work, Hasan loves travelling with his wife and baby daughter to see parks and friends, reciting Urdu and Persian poetry, and building community over homemade food. He welcomes questions from prospective applicants about studying history and Islam at Princeton.