About
Will Glover's research interests include South Asian colonial and post-colonial urban and cultural history, social theory, and the material culture of built environments.
He is the author of Making Lahore Modern: Constructing and Imagining a Colonial City (University of Minnesota Press, 2008; winner of the American Institute of Pakistan Studies Junior Book Award), and of several articles exploring the imbrication of built environments, knowledge cultures, and urban processes in colonial South Asia.
Glover's current research is directed towards understanding the aesthetics of modernization in mid-twentieth-century South Asia. His research questions how socio-economic concepts and practices deployed under the rubric of development have intersected with and helped shape physical designs for the proper organization of social life, particularly those designs that have explicitly problematized differences between rural and urban milieus.
Sites of particular interest to this project include mid-century new town developments in India, the re-engineering of early twentieth century agrarian landscapes and domiciles, and the institutionalization of a multi-disciplinary formation of urban design expertise across the long twentieth century. Glover is a former director of the University of Michigan's Center for South Asian Studies (2007-09), and former associate director of the International Institute at the University of Michigan (2009-11).
Selected Publications
“The Troubled Passage from ‘Village Communities’ to Planned New Town Developments in Mid-Twentieth Century South Asia,” Urban History 39.1 (2012): 105-20.
Making Lahore Modern: Constructing and Imagining a Colonial City. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Winner of the 2008 American Institute of Pakistan Studies Junior Book Award. South Asian edition published by Oxford University Press, Karachi, in 2011.
“Construing Urban Space as ‘Public’ in Colonial India: Some Notes from Punjab,” Journal of Punjab Studies 14.2 (Fall 2007): 211-24.
“Objects, Models, and Exemplary Works: Educating Sentiment in Colonial Punjab,” Journal of Asian Studies 64.3 (August 2005): 539-66. Recipient of the 2006 Urban History Association Award for Best Article in a Scholarly Journal.
Affiliation(s)
Award(s)
- American Institute of Indian Studies/National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Research Fellowship, 2011-12
- American Institute of Pakistan Studies Junior Book Award, 2008
- Bhai Gurdas Fellowship in Sikh Studies, 2007.
