Nathan Tabor

Nathan Tabor
Assistant Professor of History
Location:
4410 Friedmann Hall, Mail Stop 5334
Mailing address:
Department of History
Western Michigan University
1903 W Michigan Ave
Kalamazoo MI 49008-5334 USA
Education:
  • Ph.D., Asian Cultures and Languages, The University of Texas at Austin, 2014
Bio:

Nathan Tabor is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Western Michigan University.

Research

Nathan Tabor is a historian of Muslim South Asia and the wider Middle East, specializing in Urdu and Persian literatures and their patronage from the early modern period to the present. His research focuses on sociability and how Islamicate societies construct publicity and popular cultures. He uses ethnographic, historical, and digital humanities approaches to analyze a variety of Persian-, Hindi-, and Urdu-language sources from the seventeenth century to the present.

His forth-coming book, City of Lyrics: Ordinary Poets and Islamicate Popular Culture in Early Modern Delhi, is a history of the Urdu- and Persian-language poetry gathering. Urdu speakers today call this a musha'irah, one of the world's largest institutions for the performance, circulation, and enjoyment of lyric verse. This book analyzes the musha'irah’s early history through the diaries, poetry collections, and lore that document famous gatherings held in Mughal India over the 1700s. The history of the musha’irah helps us to re-evaluate class-based connections to literature and to better understand popular culture in Islamicate South Asia and the Middle East today. This book is with the Islamic Civilization and Muslim Networks series through the University of North Carolina Press. 

A new project considers a popular wrestling manual written in verse and its extensive commentaries written in prose. This composition from late seventeenth-century Isfahan remained popular in India into the late-nineteenth century to illustrate popular constructions of Islamicate erotics, masculinity, and embodiment through sports and lower-class linguistic registers. His further interests include histories of drugs and trade on the Indian Ocean and Islamic devotional musics. His essays can be found in the Journal of Urdu Studies

Teaching
Nathan Tabor teaches courses in world history, specifically on the Middle East, Islamic history, and South Asia. He is also heading a university-wide educational initiative funded by a grant from the Department of Education which brings new undergraduate courses on Hindi language and South Asian culture to WMU through curricular development and community outreach. 

Undergraduate courses

HIST 1450, Heroes and Villains in the Middle Ages 

HIST 2030, World History Since 1500

HIST 3015, History and Film

HIST 3850, Modern Middle East

HIST 4825, Drugs in World History

Graduate seminars and advising

HIST 5850, Global Islams
 

I am interested in working with MA students focused on Islamic history, broadly defined. For Ph.D. students, please reach out and we can discuss your project related to history in South Asia.