Navras Jaat Aafreedi
Dr. Navras J. Aafreedi is an Assistant Professor of History at Presidency University in Kolkata, India; a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP); a Fellow of Salzburg Global Seminar under its Holocaust Education and Genocide Prevention Program and its Asia Peace Innovators Forum; a member of the Advisory Group on Addressing Antisemitism through Education, formed under the joint auspices of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO); an associate of UNESCO and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s joint International Program on Holocaust and Genocide Education
(IPHGE), and a Visiting Research Scholar at the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies, Brandeis University (2025-2028).
Dr. Aafreedi’s courses in Jewish history and Holocaust studies are the only such courses in Asia, excluding China and Israel. He introduced Jewish/Judaic studies in South Asian academia with the launch of his undergraduate course in global Jewish history, titled “The Jews: A Global History, From the Earliest Times to the Present.”
His numerous publications include a monograph, Jews, Judaizing Movements and the Traditions of Israelite Descent in South Asia (New Delhi: Pragati Publications, 2016), a co-edited collection, Conceptualizing Mass Violence: Representations, Recollections, and Reinterpretations (London & New York: Routledge, 2021), several papers in peer-reviewed journals, such as Journal of Modern Jewish Studies (Taylor & Francis), Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies (Purdue University), Religions (MDPI), Journal of Indo-Judaic Studies (The Society for Indo-Judaic Studies), etc., chapters in edited books published by prestigious international scholarly publishing houses, such as Oxford University Press, Brill, De Gruyter, Routledge, Springer, Indiana University Press, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Lexington (Rowman & Littlefield), etc., and articles and op-eds in popular media, including India’s leading English daily newspapers, such as The Times of India, The Pioneer, The Telegraph, etc., Israel’s Yedioth Ahronoth, and digital media platforms, such as The Wire, Himal Southasian, Scroll, India Times, News 18, Swarajya, Cafe Dissensus Everyday, etc.
Dr. Aafreedi has held visiting fellowships at the universities of Tel Aviv (2006-07) and Sydney (2015), the Woolf Institute, Cambridge, UK (2010) [he was the first recipient of the visiting fellowship awarded by the Centre for the Study of Muslim-Jewish Relations, Woolf Institute, Cambridge, UK] and been a scholar-in-residence for summer institutes at St. John’s College, Oxford under the auspices of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism & Policy (ISGAP), New York (2017) and the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies, Brandeis University (2025).
Some of his publications have been translated into French, German, Russian, Spanish and Turkish. Although he writes primarily in English, he is the first person to make any worthwhile contributions to Jewish Studies in the Urdu language, the lingua franca of linguistically diverse South Asian Muslims.
He has been teaching at the tertiary level since 2010. Prior to joining Presidency University, Kolkata in 2016, he taught at Gautam Buddha University, Greater NOIDA in the National Capital Region (NCR) of Delhi.
Dr. Aafreedi received his entire education, right from the primary to the tertiary level, in his hometown Lucknow. He received his primary and secondary education at La Martiniere Boys’ College, Lucknow and tertiary education at the University of Lucknow, from where he earned the degrees of BA, MA, and PhD in History. He wrote his doctoral thesis on “Indian Jewry and the Self-Professed ‘Lost Tribes of Israel’ in India”.
For more about him, please click on the link: https://linktr.ee/njaafreedi
