By Peggy McInerny, Director of Communications
The author of 12 books and editor of three volumes of academic research, Richard M. Eaton has made signal contributions to the field of Islamic studies.
UCLA International Institute, July 28, 2026 — Richard M. Eaton, a well-known and respected social-cultural historian of Islam and premodern India (1000—1800), has been awarded the 25th Giorgio Levi Della Award in Islamic Studies by the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies, or CNES.*
As part of the award, CNES hosts a scholarly conference on a theme selected by Eaton, at which he delivers a formal lecture. That conference, “Sufis in Premodern Persianate Society and Politics,” will be held at UCLA this coming fall on November 5, 2026. UCLA historians Nile Green and Choon Hwee Koh are organizing the event, with the proceedings to be published as a new volume in the Giorgio Levi Della Vida Series in Islamic Studies.
“It is a distinct honor for CNES to award the Della Vida Award to Professor Eaton. His innovative scholarship and towering impact on Islamic studies and Asian history deserve to be celebrated at UCLA,” said Kevan Harris, associate professor of sociology and interim director of CNES. Nile Green, historian of the multiple globalizations of Islam and Muslims, noted, “Professor Eaton published his first monograph, ‘Sufis of Bijapur,’ back in 1978, pioneering a social historical approach to Islamic hagiographies written in the Bijapur Sultanate of India. Over the past six decades, he has repeatedly expanded both the cultural and geographical frontiers of Islamic studies.
Choon Hwee Koh, historian of the Ottoman Empire, commented, “For such a towering figure in the field, Professor Eaton is remarkably generous — a rare quality in academia that too often rewards combativeness. As his former student, what has inspired me most is his playful curiosity and ever-evolving intellectual range, both evident in the extraordinary breadth of his oeuvre.”
Eaton has made great contributions to Islamic studies, especially Islam in premodern South and Southeast Asia, where the majority of Muslims in the world live today. The historian’s phrase, “the fluidity of Indo-Islamic identities,” conveys how his scholarly work focuses on the interactions between the Hindu and Islamic realms of India, as well as the impact of Persian culture, and the ways in which these contending realms shaped the premodern culture of India. His approach stands in contrast to the previously predominant binary paradigm of antagonism between the two religions in South Asia, particularly in India.
The historian has explored these interactions in monographs that address the social roles of the Sufis, the Indian sultanate of Bijapur, the growth of Islam in Bengal, and memory and art in the Deccan. (The Deccan is a plateau that occupies most of the southern part of the Indian peninsula. Its northern region was ruled by a series Islamic sultanates starting in the 14th century through the mid-19th century, when direct British rule was imposed on India).
Eaton earned a Ph.D. in history at the University of Wisconsin and went on to join the history faculty of the University of Arizona, where he has been teaching since 1972. He is the award-winning author, co-author and/or editor of 12 books and the co-editor of three volumes of academic research on Mughal and South Asian history. By 1999, he was already included among the nine “all-time historians of India” identified in “The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing” (Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999; ed. Kelly Boyd).
Among his many books are:
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“India in the Persianate Age, 1000–1765” (Penguin, 2019; University of California, 2019). The book was published in Italian in 2023 by Hoepli.
- “Power, Memory, Architecture: Contested Sites on India’s Deccan Plateau,” with Phillip B. Wagoner (Oxford, 2014), which won two scholarly awards, one from the Association of Asian Studies (A.K. Coomaraswamy Prize, 2016) and one from the American Historical Association (John F. Richards Prize, 2015).
- “Social History of the Deccan, 1300–1761: Eight Indian Lives” (Cambridge, 2005), which was published in Chinese in 2014 by Yunnan People’s Publishing House.
- “The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760” (UC, 1993; Oxford, 1997), which is now in its sixth reprint. The volume has won three book awards — from the Middle East Studies Association (Albert Hourani Book Award, 1994), the University of Arizona (co-winner, College of Social and Behavioral Sciences Book Award, 1994) and the Association of South Asian Studies (A.K. Coomaraswamy Prize, 1995), respectively.
- “India’s Islamic Traditions, 711–1750” (Oxford, 2002), an edited volume that is now in its fourth reprint and ninth paperback edition.
- “Sufis of Bijapur, 1300–1700: Social Roles of Sufis in Medieval India” (Princeton, 1978; Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, New Delhi, 1996).
In addition to books, Eaton has contributed some 50 chapters to collections of scholarly works and written a prodigious number of book reviews and articles for peer-reviewed academic journals and/or scholarly encyclopedias.
Eaton is a dedicated teacher as well as a recognized scholar. Over the course of his 54 years as a professor, he has taught courses and seminars at both the undergraduate and graduate levels on Asian religions, Muslim history and societies, world history, comparative history, slavery in world history, Indian history, Indian Islamic traditions and Islamic mysticism, as well as the Persian language. During a one-year visiting professorship at Brown University in 1988–99, he received the highest student ratings for teaching excellence among its history faculty.
The many the notable honors and fellowships that he has received over the course of his career include: the Distinguished Contributions in Asian Studies Award of the Association for Asian Studies (2023); three film awards for “Through the Looking Glass,” a one-hour film on European contact with Asia aired on public television (2022), for which Eaton wrote the intellectual content; an academic yearlong Woodrow Wilson Center Fellowship; an NEH Fellowship; and two Fulbright-Hayes awards.
The Tipu Sultan Shahi Mosque, Kolkata, West Bengal State, India. (Photo: Deepanjan Ghosh via WikiCommons,
2016; cropped.) CC BY SA-4.0 International.
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Robert Eaton reflects on a career of scholarship
Why did medieval and precolonial India interest you as a scholar? What most interested you about the Deccan plateau and its history? What do you consider essential for understanding the history of India overall?
After living in Iran for two years in the early 1960s, during which time I traveled to India for a month, I became fascinated with the deep history of Persian-Indian relations, and in particular, the influence that Iran and Persian culture had on India. That naturally led me to the study of Indian history, especially the period when the Persian language had the greatest influence in India, which was the precolonial period.
My interest in the Deccan stemmed from having done graduate work at the University of Wisconsin with two professors who had themselves worked extensively in the Deccan, Bob Frykenberg and John Richards.
What I’ve learned that I consider essential for understanding South Asian history is the extraordinary degree to which India was shaped by its interactions with the outside world – Southeast Asia, East Asia, East Africa and Europe, but especially Central Asia and the Middle East.
Your first book was “The Sufis of Bijapur, 1300-1700,” and the theme you have chosen for the Giorgio Levi Della Vida conference in November 2026 is "Sufis in Premodern Persianate Society and Politics." What most interests you about Sufism and the lived experience of Sufis, both in premodern India and elsewhere in the Islamic world?
What has always interested me most about Sufism is the manifold social roles that Sufis played over time and across the immense space of the Islamic world, and even beyond. A promising avenue for future research would be comparative and institutional studies of Sufi shrines in various societies.
What do you consider the biggest contributions of the "Persianate World" framework first delineated by Marshall Hodgson? What do you think of the "Arabicate" counterpart to the Persianate World?
Over the past 25 years, the notion of the “Persianate World” has proven to be an especially fertile line of scholarly investigation in non-Western studies. For South Asian history in particular, its greatest contribution has been a more historically grounded paradigm for theorizing Indian history than the threadbare, anachronistic and (often) politically driven narrative of endemic Hindu-Muslim conflict. As a civilizational model, one may certainly find many points of comparison and contrast between the “Arabicate” world and the Persianate, Hellenistic, Latin or Sanskrit worlds.
In what languages do historians need to conduct research on medieval and premodern Indian history? On Sufi history? Have those languages expanded over time to include local languages in which government documents were written?
Persian, of course, but depending on the region, also early Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Tamil, Marathi, etc. Rulers in the 16th and 17th centuries chose to use vernacular languages for local administration, such as Telugu by the Qutb Shahi sultans of Golconda, Bengali by the Bengal sultan or Marathi by the ’Adil Shahi sultans of Bijapur.
What do you consider the most important training needed today to become an historian of premodern Islamic cultures and empires? Do you consider being able to converse in the modern languages of the present-day nations that have grown out of these cultures and empires important?
The most important training is to be exposed to as many different ways of “doing history” as possible, and to write substantial term papers and master’s theses before embarking on a doctoral dissertation. Learning the appropriate modern languages is obviously essential for navigating one’s way around local repositories – libraries, record rooms, private collections, archives, etc.
Are there still widely held beliefs in the field of premodern Indian history and the history of Islam that you think should be challenged or reconsidered?
Certainly, the tsunami of postmodernist thought, which washed over the academic world from the 1980s and is still very much with us today, has had a nugatory effect on the writing of all South Asian history, and to a lesser extent, Islamic studies. See my article “(Re)imag(in)ing Other²ness” in the Journal of World History 11/1 (Spring 2000).
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* Giorgio Levi Della Vida (1886–1967) was a Jewish Italian expert in the history and culture of the Near East. See information on the CNES award named in his honor, which was created by historian Gustave E. von Grunebaum, founding director of CNES. The award has been continuously awarded — mostly on a biennial basis — since 1967.
Published: Tuesday, July 28, 2026
