Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia

Osama is a fourth-year Ph.D. Candidate in the History Department. He received his B.A. (Hons) from the Lahore University of Management Sciences, where he majored in history, and an M.Phil. in Modern South Asian Studies from the University of Cambridge, UK.  His dissertation, titled City of Knowledge: Lahore’s Urdu Bazaar as engine of Print, Urbanity and Self-fashioning, functions at the intersection of South Asian history, history of knowledge, and urban history. It examines the efflorescence of Urdu print culture in mid-nineteenth century Lahore and demonstrates how this led to the emergence of the Urdu Bazaar – a distinctive site of knowledge production that endures even today.