Room 101, School of Arts and Sciences
Central Campus
Through discussion of a pre-circulated essay and close readings of some poems, this session will focus on the cultural legacy of the medieval Indo-Persian poet, Amir Khusrau, in the field of qawwali, which is a form of Sufi musical performance.
Sunil Sharma is Professor of Persianate & Comparative Literature at Boston University. His areas of research are premodern Persian and South Asian literatures, specifically poetry and court cultures, history of the book, and travel writing. His last book, Mughal Arcadia: Persian Poetry in an Indian Court (Harvard University Press, 2017) is a study of early modern Persianate literature. The output of a multi-year project entitled “Veiled Voyagers: Muslim Women Travelers from Asia and the Middle East” with Siobhan Lambert-Hurley and Daniel Majchrowicz was recently published as Three Centuries of Travel Writing by Muslim Women (Indiana University Press, 2023). He has written about various aspects of Amir Khusrau's poetry and also published translations in In the Bazaar of Love: The Selected Poetry of Amir Khusrau (Penguin, 2011).
