William Glover

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. His work explores the imbrication of built environments, knowledge cultures, and urban processes in colonial South Asia. Glover's current research is directed towards understanding how socio-economic concepts and practices deployed under the rubric of urbanism 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. His most recent book, Reformatting Agrarian Life: Urban History from the Countryside in Colonial India (forthcoming from Stanford University Press), explores the migration of urban concepts into the agrarian spaces of colonial north India. Glover has served as Director of the University of Michigan's Center for South Asian Studies (2007-09; 2018-19), Associate Director of the International Institute at the University of Michigan (2009-11), Director of Graduate Studies in the department of History (2013-16), and Chair of the Department of History (2024-present).

Selected Publications

Reformatting Agrarian Life: Urban History from the Countryside in Colonial India, Stanford University Press, 2025.

“The Other Agrarian Urbanisation: Urbanism in the Village," Urbanisation, 6.1 (2021), 35-48.

“Living in a Category: A History of India’s ‘Census Town’ Problem from Colonial Punjab,” in The Economic and Political Weekly, 53.2 (January 13, 2018), 55-61.

“The Khalsa Heritage Complex by Moshie Safdie,” in Pashaura Singh and Louis Fenech, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Sikh Studies (Oxford: The University of Oxford Press, 2014).

“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)

• Department of History
• International Institute

Award(s)

Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, faculty fellowship, 2021

Michigan Humanities Award, 2016

American Institute of Indian Studies/National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Research Fellowship, 2011-12

Field(s) of Study

• Colonial and post-colonial South Asia
• Urban and architectural history
• Material culture
• Aesthetics of modernization