Mana Kia

I am a scholar of the connected histories of early modern Persianate Asia with a focus on the circulation of people, texts, practices, and ideas between South and West Asia from the 17-19^th centuries. I have a particular interest in hermeneutical horizons and meaning worlds Indo-Persian literary culture and social history. My work is transregional, straddling Middle Eastern and South Asian studies. It is also interdisciplinary, drawing on sources and approaches of history, literature, and historical anthropology. I make use of the methodological and analytic tools of Intra-Asian, Indian Ocean, post/decolonial, and gender and sexuality studies.

My first book, Persianate Selves (2020) explores how early modern conceptions of place and origins provided expansive possibilities of Persian selfhood.

Under the broad working group heading of “Alternate Modes of Existence,” my newer work considers how precolonial forms of knowing and being can be used to reinvigorate imaginations and furnish new resources for addressing growing intertwined crises of capitalism and climate chaos. Inspired by decolonial thought, feminist historiography, and critical philology, I seek to engage with ideas and practices of Persianate adab (proper aesthetic and ethical form) as both historical subject and analytic method.

My current book project, Another Way of Being: Adab in the Persianate World outlines how a shared sense Persianate adab (as culture) was imagined and enacted in the transregional circulation of people, texts, practices, and ideas between Iran and Hindustan just before modern empires. I treat adab as embodied ethical forms (of social conduct, for instance) tied to aesthetic forms that lived beyond the written page or word, animating social meanings and practices, and providing a grammar of experience more broadly. Beyond circulation and the shape of the Persianate world, I focus on the ubiquitous politically and socially significant forms of companionship that structured both Persianate societies and the texts that remain of them. I argue that understanding the constitutive importance of these relationships allows us to read texts anew, envision historical political forms differently, and to see a homo amicus as the normative desiring subject of Persianate culture. I also think through how to understand religious, class, and gendered difference from this normative subject.

My work has been supported by grants from the ACLS/Mellon Foundation and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC)/Mellon Foundation; as well as the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life and the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia.  I have been a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the History of Emotions, Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and a senior faculty fellow at the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia.

Undergraduate courses regularly taught: Societies and Cultures Across the Indian Ocean (global core); Asian Humanities (global core); Contemporary Civilization (Core).

Graduate courses (all 4000-level) taught: Gender, Culture and Power in Early Modern India; Readings in Persian Texts; Transregional; and Significant Others.

In addition to research, writing, and teaching/mentoring, I have been on the executive board of the Society for the Study of Persianate Societies; Associate Editor for History for the Journal of Iranian Studies; an editorial board member of the Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient, and on the Executive Committee of the Columbia chapter of the American Association of University Professors.

I completed my PhD at Harvard University, MA at NYU, and BA at Vassar College. I also previously taught in the History and Literature program at Harvard University.