Position: Assistant Professor
Field: Early Modern, Individual and Self, Material History, Gender and Sexuality
Region: South Asia
Office: 342 Old Horticulture
Office hours: Wednesdays 2-3pm; Thursdays 1-2pm
Email: rajanis1@msu.edu
Shayan Rajani is a historian of early modern South Asia. His research focuses on the relationship between individual and group, and region and empire. He is also interested in questions around gender and sexuality, and animal-human relations.
His first book project, Leaving Legacies: The Individual in Early Modern South Asia, examines the enterprise of assembling texts, monuments, and children as concerted material traces for posterity. It investigates the intellectual, social, and material history of the individual in South Asia between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. Using little-known and to-date underutilized textual sources in Persian and Sindhi, alongside the study of buildings, epigraphy, and objects, the book reveals how the gendered individual was central to Mughal and post-Mughal order.
He received his doctoral degree in History from Tufts University. His research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. A complete list of his scholarly publications can be found on his website.