In Memoriam: Professor Sadrul Khan

Sadrul Khan, an instructor in the Humanities and Social Sciences Department, passed away yesterday. Professor Khan joined NYU-Poly in 1998 and was an enormously dedicated professor who cared deeply about his students. He received his PhD from Ludwig Maximillian University (Germany), where he trained with top scholars in political science and continued his postgraduate studies at the New School, where he studied with prominent historians including Charles Tilly and Eric Hobsbawm. His academic interests included European political history, South Asian history and development studies and his teaching was influenced by the commitment of the Jesuit teachers who taught him as a young man. From them, he learned the importance of creating opportunities for his students to succeed.

Professor Khan also did many extraordinary things outside of the academic arena. He lived and worked around the globe including Japan, Afghanistan, Turkey and Poland. He spoke eight languages. He had an extraordinary commitment to justice and progressive political causes and pursued an honest and open political system both here and in his native country. As a young man he organized a union of Dacca's rickshaw drivers. He also fought as a combat officer in the 1971 Bangladesh revolution against Pakistan and spent hundreds of hours there helping immigrants with problems that required advanced literacy to address. Professor Khan leaves behind a wife and a young son in New York, and brothers in Austria, Canada and Bangladesh.

Professor Khan will be sorely missed by his students, faculty colleagues, and the NYU-Poly community.