Subah Dayal

Subah Dayal is a historian of early modern South Asia, with a focus on the intersections of the Persianate and Indian Ocean worlds. Her first book manuscript, Between Household and State: The Mughal Frontier and the Politics of Circulation in Peninsular India (under contract with The University of California Press), draws on literary and archival materials in Persian, Urdu, and Dutch. It bridges two separate approaches in global history that are used to reconstruct a world before European colonialism – cultural studies of land-based agrarian courts (the “Persianate”) as well as the social history of maritime empires (“Indian Ocean”). Between Household and State examines how senses of belonging, embodied in the concept of ghar or house, shaped mobility and circulation across the varied ecologies of Mughal South Asia. For the completion of this book, she was awarded a Kluge fellowship at the Library of Congress in 2021-2022. Her broader research interests are in connected histories, household studies, comparative early modernities, global history, and pre-modern documentary and manuscript cultures.

Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, and Iran and the Deccan: Persianate Art, Culture, and Talent in Circulation, Past and Present, and The Wire. As a 2017 NEH Summer Fellow Dayal developed approaches for teaching connected histories on "Beyond East and West: Exchanges and Interactions across the Early Modern World (1400-1800)." Before Gallatin, Dayal taught at Tulane and Clemson. As a mark of her commitment to engaged learning, Dayal survived an epic mountain hike in the desert heat while taking Gallatin students to Oman.