About Julia

Julia Stephens is a historian who studies entangled histories of law, religion, family, and economy in South Asia, the Indian Ocean, and global diasporas. Her early work focused on law and Islam in colonial South Asia, including her first book, entitled Governing Islam: Law, Empire, and Secularism in South Asia (Cambridge. 2018). More recently Professor Stephens interests have shifted to wider geographies as she has traced the lives and legacies of Asian migrants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She has spent the last few years following the trails of migrants and their families, from the mixed raced families of Bengali sailors turned restauranteurs, to Ismaili trading networks linking India, the Swahili Coast, and the Persian Gulf. Her current book project focuses on how diasporic families transmit legacies across generations, through entanglements of material inheritances and immaterial memories. This work draws on her extensive experience working with legal records, but also has led her to explore new archives, including jewelry, cemeteries, photographs, oral histories, and digital ancestry platforms. Professor Stephens is particularly interested in how these alternative archives generate new perspectives on the role of families in shaping diasporic economic, including the crucial role of women, whose contribution are often not apparent in official state or business records.

While at NYU Abu Dhabi, Professor Stephens looks forward to working with the archives of the Family Business History project and the Akkasah Center for Photography. She would also love to collaborate with members of the NYU Abu Dhabi community, including students and alums, who are interested in tracing their own diasporic roots.