The Making of an American Islamicist: The Early Career of Richard M. Eaton

November 2026 sees Richard M. Eaton presented with the biennial Giorgio Levi Della Vida Award in Islamic Studies from UCLA. But it was exactly fifty years ago that he finished work on his first book, Sufis of Bijapur, 1300-1700: Social Roles of Sufis in Medieval India. The book pioneered a socio-historical approach to the spread of Islam in South Asia, focusing on the various social roles played by Sufis in the Deccan region of southern India. In the decades since, Eaton has written six more monographs, broadening in scope from the Deccan to the Punjab, Bengal and ‘Persianate India’ writ large. His books have won many prestigious prizes from the Middle East Studies Association, the Association for Asian Studies, and the American Historical Association. In this episode, we focus on his formative experiences as a scholar of Islam, from his travels through Iran and Afghanistan in the 1960s to his historical studies in the United States and his search for manuscripts in India that fed into that first book, Sufis of Bijapur, 1300-1700: Social Roles of Sufis in Medieval India (Princeton University Press, 1978).