Meghan Hartman

I am a scholar of South Asian religions, specializing in the literatures of Buddhist, Hindu, and Islamic traditions spanning from the seventeenth to twentieth century. I work in the linguistic realms of Urdu, Persian, Sanskrit, and Classical Arabic. I earned my doctorate in South Asian religions from the University of Virginia.

My current book project, Immersive Environments: Mīrājī and the Experience of Lyric Worlds centers on Mīrājī (1912-1949), a genderbending South Asian Muslim poet, Urdu literary critic, and translator. The central question of the book asks: how does one enter a world completely and fully, what is that experience like? And why might these two questions be an important way to rethink political sovereignty in late colonial South Asia My working answer grows from Mīrājī’s approach to lyric poetry as an immersive virtual environment to experiment with forms of selfhood and gender expression – at times transforming his own identity as a Muslim man into the famous female Hindu poet Mirabai or the Buddha himself through performance. I demonstrate how Mīrājī forges a theory of South Asian lyric poetry based on premodern and early modern Buddhist, Hindu, and Islamic traditions – and why this was politically salient at a time of hardening religious and linguistic identities in late colonial South Asia. If you are so inclined, you can find my articles on lyric poetry and imaginative praxis in the Journal for Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East and South Asian History and Culture.

Other projects on the horizon include: dreaming transgender lives in the Yoga Vāsiṣṭha, itself a composite text replete with Hindu and Buddhist philosophical flows, and a history of translation from Sanskrit into Persian and Islamic philosophical keys; creating a digital virtual reality experience of selected poems; and a book compiling Mīrājī’s translated literary critical essays in collaboration with Geeta Patel.

At Barnard, I teach courses on South Asian religions and literatures, lyric poetry, sexuality, and virtual reality. A directive, always animating my research and teaching, is how to foreground humane interpretive approaches to address structures of inequity. Courses range from introductory lectures to upper-level seminars, such as “Introduction to Hinduism,” and “More than Real: Dreams, Imagination, and Virtual Reality in South Asian Religions.” Additionally, I have the privilege to teach “Religion Lab,” a course leading majors through the history of the field, introducing methodologies to develop responsible research habits, and what questions humane scholarship should address.