Sanjay Subrahmanyam, University of California, Los Angeles
Mirrors of Empire: Narratives of Self in Mughal India
Wednesday, October 29 @ 4:15 p.m. in 108 Hahn Hall, Pomona College
Sanjay Subrahmanyam is Distinguished Professor & Irving and Jean Stone Endowed Chair in Social Sciences in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. A specialist of the early modern period, he is the author of numerous original and highly influential books, essays, and edited volumes, ranging between studies of India and the Indian Ocean, the early modern European empires, and reflections on global history as a field of research. His works include: The Political Economy of Commerce (1990), Improvising Empire (1990), The Portuguese Empire in Asia (1993),The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (1997), Symbols of Substance (1992) and Textures of Time (2001) with Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman, Penumbral Visions (2001), the two-volume Explorations in Connected History (2005), Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries (2007) and Writing the Mughal World (2011) with Muzaffar Alam, Three Ways to Be Alien (2011), Courtly Encounters (2012), Europe’s India (2017), Empires Between Islam and Christianity (2018), and Across the Green Sea (2024). Most recently, Subrahmanyam and his frequent co-author Muzaffar Alam have completed Mirrors of Empire: Courtiers, Diplomats, and Intellectuals in Mughal India, a book on “ego-documents” and first-person narratives in the Mughal empire, to appear in 2026.