My research explores the languages, literatures, and material forms of writing that have shaped South Asia since the thirteenth century. I am particularly interested in how multilingualism and literacy have been produced and experienced beyond the work of canonical authors: who learned to read and write, how they learned, what kinds of texts they encountered, and what writing meant to people who could not read. Bringing together literary history, historical linguistics, philology, and the study of material culture, my work examines subjects ranging from Urdu lexicography and multilingual vocabularies to literary translingualism, vernacular inscriptions, and the history of everyday cultural practices. My first book, Negotiating Languages: Urdu, Hindi, and the Definition of Modern South Asia (Columbia University Press, 2016), examines the ways linguistic categories and the relationship between Urdu and Hindi were shaped by intellectual, political, and cultural change.

My current research focuses on two book projects. Pedagogies of Power: Multilingual Vocabularies in South Asian Verse examines the long history of the niṣāb, a genre of multilingual vocabularies in verse used across South Asia as a tool for language learning and cultural transmission. By tracing these texts from Sanskrit and Perso-Arabic precedents through the Mughal and colonial periods, the project explores how language, knowledge, and social values were transmitted to generations of students through acts of reading, recitation, and memorization. Ephemera in Stone: Vernacular Literacy and the Urdu Public Text turns to inscriptions and other non-paper sources to recover the history of vernacular writing from the perspective of the largely anonymous scribes, inscriptionists, and readers who produced and encountered these texts. Together, these projects seek to broaden our understanding of South Asian literary and linguistic history by attending not only to celebrated authors and major works, but also to the everyday practices and material environments through which language was learned, written, and circulated.

Curriculum Vitae