Mana Kia is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. She received her PhD in History/Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University. Her interests are the early modern connected social, cultural, intellectual histories of West, Central, and South Asia from the 17th - 19th centuries. Her first book, Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin before Nationalism, is forthcoming from Stanford University Press. She is working on a second book, Sensibilities of Belonging: The Transregional Persianate between Iran and India, outlining how a shared sense of aesthetic and ethical form (as culture) was socially enacted in the transregional circulation of people, texts, and ideas between Iran and India.

Light lunch served.