Anurag Advani

Advani recently finished his Ph.D. in South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where his dissertation explored a gradual transformation in ideas of madness and mental illness in early modern South Asia between the 16th and 18th centuries. It studies the changing causes, diagnoses, and treatments for various psychological disorders in Indo-Persian medical manuscripts in tandem with cultural discussions of insanity in court chronicles, Persian and Urdu poetry, jurisprudential and philosophical manuals, paintings, and occult treatises. Advani has published a journal article, “The Madness of the Majzubs: Three Sufi Hagiographies in Sixteenth-Century Mughal India” and co-authored an entry on the female Mughal physician Sati-un-Nisa for Women in the History of Science: A Sourcebook. His forthcoming publications include a chapter for the Bloomsbury Cultural History of Madness, and an article on an eighteenth-century verse-narrative (masnavi) by the Urdu poet Mir Taqi Mir.

Appointed to the Faculty

Educational Background

Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
M.A., University of California, Berkeley
M.A., The University of Chicago
B.A., St. Stephen's College, University of Delhi