Mana Kia

Mana Kia is an Associate Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. Her interests are the connected social, cultural, intellectual histories of West, Central, and South Asia from the 17th - 19th centuries. Her first book, Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin before Nationalism, explores how premodern conceptions of place and origins provided expansive possibilities of Persian selfhood. She has also published book chapters and articles on travel writing, gendered concepts of modernity, and various aspects of transregional Persianate culture. She is working on a second book, which outlines how a shared sense of aesthetic and ethical form (adab as culture) was socially enacted in the transregional circulation of people, texts, and ideas between Iran and Hindustan.