Speaker: Allison Busch, Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, Columbia University

Allison Busch's research centers on early modern Hindi literature and cultural history, with a special interest in courtly India. She is the author of Poetry of Kings (Oxford, 2011), a book about Mughal-period literary culture. She has published numerous articles on the literary and intellectual life of seventeenth-century sub-imperial courts. Culture and Circulation, an edited volume (with Dr. Thomas de Bruijn of Leiden, the Netherlands) that explores literary history from a multilingual point of view, has recently come out from Brill. Her current research is on local histories from the Mughal-period that were recorded in classical Hindi dialects such as Brajbhasha and Rajasthani. She is also the recent recipient of an ACLS collaborative grant and is co-authoring a book on aesthetic worlds of the Indian heroine with art historian Molly Aitken.