is a historian of early modern South Asia, with a particular emphasis on the literary, political, and intellectual culture of the Mughal Empire.  He completed his PhD in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago in 2008, and he currently teaches in the History Department at Northwestern University. 

Kinra’s research draws on several linguistic traditions (especially Persian, but also Hindi-Urdu and Sanskrit), using archival sources to investigate diverse modes of civility, tolerance, cosmopolitanism, and modernity across the Indo-Persian and Indian Ocean worlds. Many of these themes are explored in a series of recent articles on seventeenth-century Mughal literary and political culture, as well as Kinra’s forthcoming book on the life, Persian writings, and cultural-historical milieu of the celebrated Mughal state secretary and poet, Chandar Bhan “Brahman” (d. 1662-3), entitled Writing Self, Writing Empire: Chandar Bhan Brahman and the Cultural World of the Early Modern Indo-Persian State Secretary (University of California Press).

Kinra has been affiliated with the Forum Transregionale Studien and the Zukunftsphilologie research program from early on, having attended and given presentations on medieval and early modern Indo-Persian comparative philology at both of the Zukunftsphilologie Winter Schools in Cairo 2010 (“Textual Practices beyond Europe, 1500-1900”) and in New Delhi 2012 (“Philologies across the Asias”).  His article “Cultures of Comparative Philology in the Early Modern Indo-Persian World” will appear in a forthcoming issue of Philological Encounters.

http://www.history.northwestern.edu/people/kinra.html