Aisha Valiulla
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Aisha Valiulla is a PhD candidate in Medieval Islamic History at Northwestern University. She specializes in cultural exchange, knowledge production, and literary culture in the Medieval Indian Ocean world. In her dissertation, titled “Sailors, Scholars, and Wonders: Arabic Scholarship and the Indian Ocean World, 900—1400,” she analyzes Arabic histories, geographies, and merchant accounts to trace the transition of the Islamic world into the Indo-Islamic world and the centrality of merchant accounts in the textual conceptualization of India.
She holds a BA in History and an MA in English Literature, both from Virginia Commonwealth University. She won the Northwestern History Department's Lacey Baldwin Smith Prize for Teaching Excellence in 2020 and the Weinberg College Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award in 2023. She is a Digital Media Fellow at the Nicholas D. Chabraja Center for Historical Studies. She is also an active member of the History Graduate Teaching Committee. Her languages include Arabic, Hindi-Urdu, Spanish, and some Gujarati.