This graduate student is available to deliver lectures to your K-12 classroom at no charge. All requests MUST be booked through the Middle East Center Speaker's Bureau.
Ayesha is a doctoral candidate at the Department of South Asia Studies. She is broadly interested in music and musical practices, both traditional and classical, of South Asia. Her dissertation, framed as a political history of music, studies the developing musicological milieu of North India, c.1428-1605 CE, against the backdrop of a contested political landscape. Her project draws on a wide archive - literature, music texts, histories, dictionaries, religious (Sufi and Bhakti) literature, music paintings - in both Sanskrit and Persian.
Before arriving at Penn, Ayesha received her Masters in Music (Ethnomusicology) from King’s College London. Her other interests include early modern history, Persian and Sanskrit literatures, courtly culture, and musical miniature paintings (ragamala).