Asheesh Kapur Siddique

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique is an associate professor in the Department of History at UMass Amherst. He is a historian of early America, early modern Europe, and the British empire whose research and pedagogy explores the role of collecting, managing, and using knowledge to the history of state formation and governance. He also writes and teaches about the historical origins of the crisis of higher education in the United States, particularly the defunding of humanities research.

Professor Siddique’s first book, The Archive of Empire: Knowledge, Conquest, and the Making of the Early Modern British World (Yale University Press, 2024) explores how modern data-driven government emerged out of the information order of the early modern state. It examines the central role of archives in the construction of the early modern British empire across the world in the 17th and 18th centuries, and how encounters with cultural difference transformed the relationship between power and information. The Archive of Empire received the 2025 Louis Gottschalk Prize from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies for "an outstanding historical or critical study on the eighteenth century" and was Runner-up for the 2025 British In India Book Prize, sponsored by The British in India Historical Trust. He is now working on a book about the relationship between material culture and sovereignty in the late eighteenth century age of Atlantic-world revolutions. His other scholarship has appeared in journals such as Art History, the Journal of British Studies, Early American Studies, the Journal of Early Modern History, Global Intellectual History, Law & History Review, Modern Intellectual History, and the William & Mary Quarterly. He has also written for public facing outlets such as The Daily Beast, History News Network, Inside Higher Ed, and Teen Vogue, and worked with the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education on developing secondary school curricula in American and European history.  

Professor Siddique was trained at Columbia University (PhD, 2016), the University of Oxford (MPhil, 2009), and Princeton University (AB, 2007). From 2016-2018, he was a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Southern California. From 2018-2019, he was a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Humanities & Information at Penn State University. His research has been supported by institutions such as the American Philosophical Society, the Huntington Library, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture, and the Social Science Research Council. 

At UMass Amherst, Professor Siddique's undergraduate courses explore subjects such as the American Revolution; early American thought and culture; the early modern British empire; the making of American capitalism; the early modern Atlantic world; the history of the corporation; the history of the university; and the history of data. His graduate seminars have covered early American historiography; scholarship on the early modern Atlantic world; and methods in cultural and intellectual history. Current PhD students are working on dissertations on a wide range of subjects, including the cultural history of the US Constitution; the origins of slavery in New England; and monuments in colonial India.

Selected:

• The Archive of Empire: Knowledge, Conquest, and the Making of the Early Modern British World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024). Recipient of the Louis Gottschalk Prize, American Society for 18th-Century Studies, 2024-2025 and runner up for the 2025 British in India Book Prize
•  "The Ideological Origins of 'Written' Constitutionalism," Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 21 (Fall 2023), 557-599. Honorable Mention, Walter D. Love Prize, North American Conference on British Studies, 2024
• "The Archival Epistemology of Political Economy in the Early Modern British Atlantic World," William & Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 77, no. 4 (October 2020), 641-674. Recipient of the 2020 Dorothy Ross Article Prize, Society for U. S. Intellectual History.