Toorawa

Shawkat M. Toorawa, assistant professor of Near Eastern studies at Cornell, has been awarded a highly coveted Andrew W. Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship for faculty members in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.

The fellowships support professors who received doctoral degrees within the past five to 15 years and whose research interests call for formal training in a discipline other than their own. Toorawa, who is interested in researching the Arabic literature of premodern Indian authors writing in Arabic, will learn Sanskrit and Hindi as well as the literary history of those languages. He also will study the social, political and intellectual history of India in the 17th to 19th centuries for a forthcoming book.

"Professor Toorawa's wide-ranging interests and work have set a new standard for my academic department," wrote Ross Brann, chair of the Department of Near Eastern Studies and the Milton R. Konvitz Professor of Judeo-Islamic Studies, in recommending Toorawa to the Mellon Foundation. Brann also described Toorawa as "a remarkably accomplished young scholar with an impressive, even daunting array of intellectual strengths and interests."

Beginning a two-year program of study this summer, Toorawa will attend Jawaharlal Nehru University and the University of Oxford for Sanskrit study, and he will interact with specialists in Arabic literature of India at Jamia Millia University, Aligarh Muslim University and Allahabad University. Toorawa also will present a number of papers in the United States and abroad before finishing his fellowship studies in summer 2008.