
Position: Assistant Professor
Field: Early Modern, Individual and Self, Material History, Gender and Sexuality
Region: South Asia
Office: 342 Old Horticulture
Office hours: Tuesdays 11–Noon; Wednesdays 12–1 P.M.
Email: srajani@msu.edu
Shayan Rajani is a historian of early modern South Asia. His research focuses on the relationship between individual and community, and region and empire. He is also interested in questions of gender and sexuality, and animal-human relations.
His first book, Leaving Legacies: The Individual in Early Modern South Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2024), 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 shows that a concern for the individual self was not an exclusively western phenomenon. Rather, the practice of leaving individual legacies was a crucial means for the production and reproduction of empire, family, and social order in South Asia.
Rajani’s second book project, titled Invisible, Everywhere: Women, Sexuality, and the Gender Order in Early Modern South Asia, explores the material and cultural history of gender segregation in the Mughal world.
He has published shorter articles and book chapters on same-sex love, the history of the ethnicity concept and other related ideas, and on Persian literature and its relationship to society and politics in early modern Sindh.
Rajani 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.