She is a professor of history at Ashoka University, India and specializes in medieval and early modern South Asia.
It was developed from her doctoral dissertation at Cambridge University, which was titled, North Indian military culture in transition.
[6] In 2001, along with historian Muzaffar Alam, she published A European Experience of the Mughal Orient: The I'jaz-i Arsalani (Oxford University Press), which was the first English translation of Persian letters written by Antoine-Louis-Henri Polier, an 18th-century Swiss adventurer and traveler.
[11] The book was reviewed by Farhat Husain in Contributions to Indian Sociology,[12] by Projit Bihari Mukharji in Social History of Medicine,[13] by Francis Robinson in Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient,[14] and Anne Marie Moulin in the International Journal of Asian Studies.
[15] In 2015, Alavi published Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the age of Empire (Harvard University Press), which is a study of five Islamic scholars who were pursued by British colonial authorities after the Indian Rebellion of 1857, and their work in establishing a global network of scholarship subsequently, spanning Cairo, Mecca, and Istanbul.