Research and Expertise

My work examines the intellectual, artistic, and material cultures of South Asia and the Persianate world, with particular attention to manuscript traditions, courtly aesthetics, and the movement of narratives across linguistic, religious, and political boundaries. I approach manuscripts as historically situated objects through which power, knowledge, and cultural memory are produced and negotiated in the premodern and early modern periods. Drawing on codicology, art history, and historical analysis, my research foregrounds the material and visual dimensions of texts alongside their literary and intellectual contexts.

Primary Research Areas

South Asian and Persianate manuscript cultures, including codicology, paleography, illumination, bindings, scribal practices, and systems of production from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries.

Mughal, Safavid, and Deccan visual and literary traditions, with attention to atelier practices, narrative cycles, book arts, and courtly modes of representation.

Transregional exchange across South Asia, Iran, Central Asia, the Ottoman world, and Europe, focusing on the circulation of stories, artistic conventions, devotional forms, and scientific knowledge.

Courtly patronage and intellectual networks, including royal libraries, imperial workshops, scholarly communities, and the relationship between knowledge production and political legitimacy.

Religion, ethics, and epistemologies of the image, particularly visual rhetoric, devotional iconography, cosmological frameworks, and moral philosophical concerns in manuscript illustration.

Thematic Interests

Kingship, gender, and authority as articulated through textual and visual forms.

Narrative traditions such as the Khamsah, Haft Paykar, Layla and Majnun, Rāgamālā cycles, and Indo Christian manuscripts.

Transcultural sanctity and interreligious encounter.

Monsters, marvels, and the imagination as epistemic and visual devices.

Archival formation, cataloging practices, and the afterlives of manuscripts.

Materiality and meaning, with particular attention to how paper, pigments, script, and texture shape intellectual and artistic expression.

Methodological Approaches

Codicological and material analysis grounded in the close study of bindings, paper structures, pigments, colophons, watermarks, layout, and paratexts.

Art historical interpretation centered on iconographic and stylistic analysis, workshop conventions, patronage, and aesthetic theory.

Textual and philological research based on Persian, Urdu, Hindi, and Sanskrit materials, with attention to translation, adaptation, and intertextuality.

Comparative and transregional frameworks that situate South Asia within broader Islamicate and global contexts.

Interdisciplinary Reach

My research engages art history, history, religious studies, literary studies, book history, material culture, and archival studies. Across research and teaching, I am committed to making manuscript cultures legible both to specialists and to broader audiences, while maintaining close attention to the intellectual rigor and material specificity these objects demand.