Said Reza Huseini specialises in Persianate and Islamic history, with a particular focus on the connected histories of Central Asia and North India from Late Antiquity to the early modern period. His research takes a longue durée and connected historical approach, drawing on a wide range of documentary and literary sources in Bactrian, Sogdian, Middle Persian, New Persian, and Arabic. He is particularly interested in tracing long-term patterns of intellectual, political, and cultural exchange across the Persianate world.
His research has resulted in publications on the socio-political history of the eastern Persianate regions, including political structures, conquest and rebellion, slavery, taxation, and family law. He has also co-authored several articles on kingship in Islam, Mongol and Mughal political ideology in leading peer-reviewed journals. A further strand of his research focuses on the history of Afghanistan. Drawing on the region’s longer historical trajectory, he examines the structural and historical roots of the recurring cycles of political instability and state failure that have shaped Afghanistan since the formation of the modern state in the late nineteenth century. His co-edited special issue, Afghanistan: A Neglected Reality (Edinburgh, 2026), brings together and further develops some of these ideas. Reza’s first book, The Arab Conquests of Bactria: Local Power Politics and Arab Domination, 651–750 CE, is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press in 2027.
Reza graduated from Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, where he studied the history of medieval Central Asia and early modern India. He subsequently continued his studies at Leiden University, where he completed a second MA and wrote a thesis on millennialism in Mughal India. He later joined the European Research Council project Embedding Conquests at Leiden and completed his PhD on the eighth-century Arab conquests in Bactria. Reza is a calligrapher of Persian and Arabic.
Reza has held research positions at King’s College, University of Cambridge, and as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University.
Academic Appointment(s)
- Primary
- Assistant Teaching Professor, College - Department of History