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Department of
Religious Studies

Daniel Morgan

Daniel Morgan

Daniel Morgan

Assistant Professor

Daniel Morgan received his BA and M.Phil. from the University of Oxford and Ph.D. from the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago in 2020. Daniel has taught courses on Indian and Islamic history at the University of Chicago and served as an Adjunct Professor at Loyola University in Chicago.

His research focuses on Islamic thought and Sufism in the Mughal Empire, with a specific interest in applied cosmological sciences and reformist political theology. He is currently writing an intellectual and social history of the Naqshbandi Sufis of North India in the early-modern period.

Daniel is also the Assistant Editor of the journal South Asian Intellectual History.

Select Publications

“Shāh ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Dihlawī on Dreaming and the Internal Senses” in C. Lange et al (eds.), Islamic Sensory History, Volume 3: 1500-2000 (Forthcoming, January 2027).

“‘Benefactor of the two worlds’: Reconsidering the Political Letters of Mirzā Jān-i Jānān (d. 1781).” Manan Ahmed (ed.), The New Mughal Historiography (Forthcoming, December 2026).

“Reforming the Occult Sciences in South Asia: Shāh Walī Allāh of Delhi’s Hawāmiʿ.” Asad Ahmed et al. (eds), Islamic Intellectual History in the Mughal Era (Cambridge University Press, 2026), 170-201.

“More Beneficial than Karl Marx: ʿUbayd Allāh Sindhī and modern receptions of Shāh Walī Allāh.” Journal of Urdu Studies 6:1 (2025), 3-35.

“Toward the Formation of a Waliullahi Public in Eighteenth-Century India: The Trials and Tribulations of Nur Allah Budhanwi (d. 1782).” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 45:1 (2025), 28–43.

“Sufis and Sultans in Eighteenth-Century Delhi: Re-evaluating the Political Letters of Shah Wali Allah of Delhi (d. 1762).” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 67:5-6 (2024), 427–463.

“Letter writing as the mingling of souls: remote knowledge exchange among eighteenth-century Naqshbandis.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 33:4 (2023): 1005–1027.