Mana Kia
Associate Professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies
Mana Kia’s interests include; the early modern and modern connective social, cultural, intellectual histories of West, Central and South Asia from the 17th – 19th centuries, with a particular focus on Indo-Persian literary culture and social history. More broadly: ruptures and continuities between the early modern and modern periods, intra-Asian travel and migration, gender and sexuality, historiographies beyond nationalism, and critical scrutiny of our own analytic and conceptual language for studying the past.
Her current book projects include; Persianate Selves, which explores how early modern conceptions of places and origins provided possibilities of Persian selfhood, more expansive than those of the modern autonomous individual. Next, she is working on Sensibilities of Belonging outlines how a shared sense of aesthetic and ethical form (as culture) was socially enacted in the transregional circulation of people, texts, and ideas. Forms of Companionship looks at how early modern forms of companionship and their ethics of love and loyalty were constitutive of society, politics and also productive of Persian texts commonly used as source materials for the study of 18th-century India.