Courtly Culture and the Question of Cosmopolitanism in Medieval India

Public guest lecture by Dr. Daud Ali, South Asia Studies, University of Pennsylvania. The lecture is part of the Ancient History Seminars at the Saxo Institute.

Date: 24th March 2017
Time: 15:00-17:00
Venue: Southern Campus, Saxo Institute, room 12.3.07

Dr Daud Ali is an historian of pre-Mughal South Asia. He taught history for many years at SOAS, University of London, before relocating to Penn in 2009. His area of training and expertise is early medieval South Asia, but his research interests have expanded over the years. His research has focused on the history of mentalities and practices in pre-Sultanate South Asia, and he has published on a wide range of subjects, including courtly and monastic discipline, mercantile practices, conventions in erotic poetry and courtship, slavery, ideas of space, time and history in inscriptions, early Southeast Asian history, and, most recently, on gardens and landscape in the medieval Deccan. Future and ongoing projects include collaborative projects on the history of friendship in early and medeival South Asia, a translation of a Buddhist text on erotics, as well as a study of the production of the king Bhoja cycles in Western India.