Baiquni Hasbi

Salam! Welcome!

I am a global historian passionate about unpacking the rich, interconnected stories of Modern Muslim Societies in Southeast Asia. Right now, I spend my days teaching as an Assistant Professor and heading up the Research and Publication team at UIN Sultanah Nahrasiyah Lhokseumawe in Aceh, Indonesia. At its core, my work looks at how fascinating historical threads connect directly to the global issues we see in the news today.

I received my Ph.D. in Global History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2023. My scholarship focuses on Southeast Asia and its intersections with the broader Indian Ocean and global networks. In my dissertation, I examined how anti-colonial figures across the Malay-Indonesian world—spanning from Acehnese religious scholars to twentieth-century nationalists—envisioned and enacted egalitarian alternatives to the unequal, Eurocentric global order between 1873 and 1950.

Things I'm Curious About & Researching

• Global Islamic Networks: Tracking the vibrant diplomatic, trade, and cultural connections that tied Southeast Asia (especially the old Aceh Sultanate) to the Ottoman Empire and beyond.
• Rethinking Anti-Colonial History: Looking past standard textbooks to view struggles like the Acehnese Perang Sabil as highly sophisticated intellectual movements that challenged Eurocentric global orders.
• Gender & Everyday Spaces: Investigating how local environments change over time, specifically how women navigate civic and public spaces like coffee shops in post-conflict Aceh.

Democratizing Knowledge: The Instagram Project

Reading Trouillot's Silencing the Past in graduate school inspired me. He said that impactful history is produced outside the "ivory tower". Thus today, in my spare time, I extract a portion of high-level scholarly works and turn it into accessible public history.

“Trouillot showed me that history truly lives in public spaces. This project takes dense academic papers, archival records, and decolonial critiques, breaking them down into highly visual, digestible slide-carousels.”

By turning complex historiographies into a short carousel post on my instagram, I help students, history buffs, and the broader public engage with critical scholarship right on their daily feeds.