Ayelet Kotler is a postdoctoral researcher at the Leiden Institute for Area Studies.

More information about Ayelet Kotler

Fields of interest

• Persian Literary Culture
• Devotional Literature
• Literary translation
• Religious Encounters in South Asia
• Sanskrit Mythology and Epics
• Cosmopolitanism and Vernacularization

Research and teaching

I am a historian of South Asian religions. My work investigates how Hindu narratives and religious traditions were reshaped in early modern multilingual and multicultural settings. Specifically, my scholarship focuses on how Persian became a medium for articulating Hindu devotion. I examine the ways in which courts, poets, and religious communities appropriated and localized Persian in their retellings of Sanskrit texts to speak to a range of political, literary, and religious concerns. My work thus engages in questions related to devotional poetry, literary translation, multilingualism, religious encounters, cosmopolitan cultures, and processes of vernacularization. My current book project, Many Persian Ramayans, is a study of the rich tradition of Persian retellings of the Sanskrit epic Ramayana from the period between the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Asking why this foundational Hindu epic narrative in its classical and medieval recensions was retold more than a dozen times in Persian over two centuries, the book reconstructs the shifting political, cultural and devotional meanings of the Ramayana in early modern Persianate South Asia and recasts Persian as a shared cultural resource across religious boundaries. 

Some of my work on Sanskrit-Persian translations produced at the Mughal court, among Persographic Hindu communities, and under British colonial rule has been published in journals like Postmedieval, Iranian Studies, Journal of Hindu Studies, and PURANA Media (see details under publications).

At Leiden, I teach classes on Hinduism and classical cultures of South Asia. Prior to joining Leiden University, I also taught classes on Persianate South Asia and offered Sanskrit classes for beginners.

Curriculum Vitae

Ph.D., University of Chicago, 2023
M.A., Tel-Aviv University, 2016
B.A., Tel-Aviv University, 2013

Publications