Hallie is a third-year PhD student in the Religious Studies department at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in Islam in South Asia. She holds an MSc in Modern South Asian Studies from the University of Oxford and a BA (Honors) in Comparative Literature and Society from Columbia University. She focuses on the relationship between Indo-Persian literary culture and Islamic ethics in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North India, with a particular interest in material texts and embodied knowledge. Her dissertation examines the material transmission of Sufi romance tales in several languages.
For the 2021-22 academic year, she is the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies Graduate Student Research Fellow, working with a set of narrative manuscripts now held in Philadelphia which were used to teach the Persian language in Indian schools. Her project draws on manuscript studies and digital humanities to map the circulation of these texts and how physical traces left by readers can be used to chart changes in the texts’ perceived meanings and status.
Prior to Penn, Hallie studied Urdu, Hindi and Persian literature and worked at the Gurmani Centre for Languages and Literature at LUMS University in Lahore, Pakistan. She is currently learning Punjabi.
