Seema Alavi (b. 1961, Lucknow, India) is a historian who specialises in early modern and modern South Asian history, with an interest in the transformation of the region’s Indo-Persian legacy into one heavily affected by British colonial rule. Professor of History at Ashoka University (2022–ongoing), she has also taught at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Jamia Millia Islamia and Delhi University. Alavi earned her PhD from Cambridge University and has twice been a Fulbright Scholar and a Smuts Visiting Fellow at Cambridge. At Harvard University, she was a visiting scholar in the Harvard-Yenching Institute (2005) as well as a William Bentinck-Smith Fellow at the Radcliffe institute (2010). She has written books on the military, medical and religious histories of India, including Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Empire (Harvard University Press, 2015), which received the Albert Hourani Award Honorable Mention (2016) and Monsoon Book Prize in Political Economy (2025).