Adam Matvya is a PhD student in the History Department with a graduate minor in Peace Studies where he works on Islam in South Asia, colonialism, and the history of emotions. Prior to Notre Dame, Adam received his BA in English Literature and his MA in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Chicago. He wrote his MA thesis on the transmission and interpenetration of Islamic legal thought between the Middle East and South Asia and the relationship between local practices of the law, emotion, and social development.
Adam’s doctoral research intersects global history and South Asian Islam, exploring the impact of British empire on Muslim thought and society through emotions. He addresses the gap in our understanding of how emotions travel from metropole to colony and shape imperial ideology and practice and how we can study the Muslim response to the crisis of empire through concepts of belonging and friendship. Specifically, he examines how emotions were mobilized by the East India Company in different areas of colonial management from politics to the law and how emotional standards and styles were contested or negotiated in cross-cultural encounters with Muslims. He also traces how norms of emotional behavior were debated in colonial discourses on ‘improvement’ and by local actors in ways that contradict colonial categories of religion and community.