This day-long workshop engages with "Pious Labor: Islam, Artisanship, and Technology in Colonial India," by Amanda Lanzillo, Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts. Pious Labor analyzes colonial-era social, economic, and technological change in north India through the perspectives of Muslim workers and artisan laborers. The book centers the stories and experiences of Muslim metalsmiths, stonemasons, tailors, press workers, and carpenters across urban north India. It provides an in-depth analysis of vernacular-language sources, including technical manuals and community histories, that were produced by members of working class and artisan communities. It connects the social marginalization of colonial-era Muslim artisans to the continued exclusion of this archive and laboring voices from scholarly analyses of South Asian Muslim histories. 
 
Workshop attendees include SherAli Tareen (Franklin & Marshall), Megan Robb (University of Pennsylvania), Prasannan Parthasarathi (Boston College), Julia Stephens (Rutgers), Gyan Prakash (Princeton) and Michael Laffan (Princeton).