Anurag Advani
Assistant Professor of Asian Studies
Advani recently finished his Ph.D. in South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where his聽dissertation explored a gradual transformation in ideas of madness and mental illness in early modern South Asia between the 16th and 18th centuries. It studies the changing causes, diagnoses, and treatments for various psychological disorders in Indo-Persian medical manuscripts in tandem with cultural discussions of insanity in court聽chronicles, Persian and Urdu poetry, jurisprudential and philosophical manuals, paintings, and occult treatises. Advani has published a journal article, 鈥淭he Madness of the聽Majzubs: Three Sufi Hagiographies in Sixteenth-Century Mughal India鈥� and co-authored an entry on the female Mughal physician Sati-un-Nisa for聽Women in the History of Science: A Sourcebook. His forthcoming publications include a chapter for the聽Bloomsbury Cultural History of Madness,聽and an article on an eighteenth-century verse-narrative (masnavi) by the Urdu poet Mir Taqi Mir.
Appointed to the Faculty
2024Educational Background
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
M.A., University of California, Berkeley
M.A., The University of Chicago
B.A., St. Stephen's College, University of Delhi
