Thomas W. Simons Jr.

Thomas W. Simons, Jr. is a Visiting Scholar at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.  He lived in British India and newly independent Pakistan in a U.S. diplomatic family in the 1940s, spent the summer of 1959 traveling around South India from Madras (Chennai), where his father was U.S. Consul General, and ended a 35-year career in the U.S. Foreign Service as Ambassador to Pakistan (1996-1998).  Simons studied Islamic history of the Classical Period as a Harvard Ph.D. candidate (1958-63); as Consulting Professor of History at Stanford (1998-2002) he taught courses on “20th-Century Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan” and “Varieties of Islamic Revival since 1870;” and as a Lecturer in Harvard’s Government Department (2007-14) he taught courses in “Post-Communist Islam,” the situations of Muslims in the post-Communist spaces, and “Islam in Central and South Asia.”  In 2003 Stanford University Press published his book Islam in a Globalizing World.  Since 2000 he has visited the Subcontinent six times, most recently in 2018, including a Ganges boat tour like ours in 2011.