Zoë Woodbury High

Biography

I am a historian of literary and material culture in early modern South Asia and the Indian Ocean world. My research focuses on connections between literature, the visual and musical arts, and social life in southern and western India. My current book project examines the history of taste (rasa) in the early modern Deccan Sultanates through a multilingual archive of Persian, Hindi-Urdu, Sanskrit, and Kannada texts, which I read alongside material sources. In addition, I am working on a study of Sufi musical aesthetics and a longer history of vernacular literature in the Deccan, which focuses on the materiality of literary texts and their life outside courtly spaces of production. I teach classes on modern and classical Hindi and Urdu literature; translation and comparison; Indian Ocean studies; and interreligious interactions in South Asia. My work is recently published or forthcoming in the volumes Islamic Intellectual History in Mughal South Asia and Islamic Sensory History and Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online. 

Research Interests

Persianate South Asia, Deccan Sultanates, manuscript studies, history of emotions, history of the senses, interreligious interactions in South Asia, connected early modernities 

Courses taught 

• Research Methods in Literature, Language and History 
• Modern South Asian Studies Core Course 
• Classical Hindi 
• Literary Hindi 

Education

• PhD, Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago 
• MA, University of Chicago Divinity School 
• BA, Barnard College