Associate Professor of History
About
Will Glover is an associate professor in the department of History. His 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 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), and Director of Graduate Studies in the department of History (2013-16).