Prashant Keshavmurthy

Prashant Keshavmurthy is an Associate Professor of Persian-Iranian Studies at the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University, where he has served since 2009 and currently holds the position of Graduate Program Director. His academic work centers on Persian literary traditions across historical periods, with specialized expertise in pre-colonial South Asian Persian poetry and its cross-cultural intersections.

His research integrates historically grounded analysis with theoretical frameworks in comparative literature, examining poetics, mysticism, and selfhood discourses across Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit, and Braj Bhasha traditions. Key focuses include the intellectual eclecticism of early modern South Asian Sufism, Persian literary theory, and the trans-Caucasian context of classical Persian works like Nizami Ganjavi's quintet.

Analysis of his publication trajectory reveals consistent exploration of prosody-mysticism interplay in Persian ghazals, Indo-Persian identity construction in Mughal commentaries, and cross-religious literary adaptations such as Hindu epics translated into Persian. His scholarship bridges philological precision with philosophical inquiry, emphasizing multilingual and multi-religious contexts of Islamicate literary production.

As Graduate Program Director, Keshavmurthy mentors students through specialized graduate seminars including Pre-Modern Persian Literary Criticism and Autobiography in the Islamic World, while teaching undergraduate courses on Persian literature in translation and South Asian Islamic literary histories.