Yusuf Umrethwala

Yusuf Umrethwala is an MA candidate in the dual degree program in Islamic Studies and Muslim Cultures at Columbia University and Aga Khan University (London). He pursued his undergraduate and graduate studies at Aljamea-tus-Saifiyah in Surat, India, with a major in Arabic literature (ʾAdab), and went on to lecture and research at the same university.

His past research interests include the expression of emotional intensity and visceral imagery by the use of lingual derivations in the poems of Ṭayyībī-Ismaʿīlī Laureates of Yemen in the 13th century. In a more recent project, his research focused on the study of the trans-national socio-religious migratory history of his community, the Dawoodi Bohras starting from the early 19th century to the present day, his findings on which were recently self-published in a book entitled Travel and You Shall Prosper: The History of Migrations of the Dawoodi Bohras. This book covers the migratory history of the Dawoodi Bohras to over 40 countries from India across 9 geographical regions with a detailed account of the early migrants and community developments. Since nothing of this kind was previously documented, his work mostly relied on oral histories and ethnographic research, and is also complemented with a rich collection of old images and archives, each of which tells and complements the vivid history of migrations. He hopes to deepen his research and use his Master's experience to enrich and publish this work. He has also studied and written on the iconography of an old wooden artifact belonging to the Western Fatimid Palace in Cairo. 

With his past research experiences in the history and literature of the Fatimid dynasty, he was always amazed by the significance of geniza documents in complementing the existing scholarship from a bottom-up approach and providing an evidentiary basis for the social history of the period. For the past two years, he has been working as a research assistant at the Princeton Geniza lab where he works primarily on Arabic script documents coupled with his limited and growing Judaeo-Arabic experience. He is currently working on updating the DIMME database. He is presently a visiting scholar at Princeton University's Near Eastern Studies Department where he is writing his dissertation on Fatimid petitions under the supervision of Professor Marina Rustow. To know more about his research, contact him at ymu2101@columbia.edu.