Anurag Advani

Anurag Advani completed a bachelor’s degree (honors) in history from St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, India, in 2014, and got a master's degree in the humanities from the University of Chicago in 2015. He will finish his Ph.D. in South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley in 2024. Advani’s dissertation explores how ideas of madness and mental illness in early modern South Asia changed 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, and occult treatises. His article, “The Madness of the Majzubs: Three Sufi Hagiographies in Sixteenth-Century Mughal India,” was published in the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient. 

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