Audrey Truschke

Audrey Truschke serves as Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Rutgers University-Newark, specializing in the cultural, imperial, and intellectual history of early modern and modern India (c. 1500-present). Her work centers on Sanskrit-Persian interactions within Mughal-era South Asia, challenging conventional historical narratives through interdisciplinary analysis of literary and political traditions.

Truschke's research investigates how Sanskrit intellectuals engaged with Islamic rule, particularly during the Mughal Empire (1560-1650). Her book Culture of Encounters examines Sanskrit's role in Persian-speaking Mughal courts, while Aurangzeb reevaluates the controversial emperor's legacy. She publishes extensively on cross-cultural exchanges, historical memory, and religious identity formation, revealing porous boundaries between Hindu and Muslim communities in premodern India. Her scholarship emphasizes recovered Sanskrit narratives of Indo-Islamic encounters that counter dominant Persianate historical records.

In 2019, she delivered a lecture series in Paris exploring Sanskrit historical texts from 1190-1720 CE, analyzing pre-Islamic Indian perspectives on Muslim incursions, evolving "Hindu" values under Indo-Persian influence, and Kashmiri historiography under Islamic rule. These presentations highlighted her methodological focus on marginalized voices and complex identity constructions in South Asian intellectual history, demonstrating how Sanskrit writers adapted religious and political categories in response to Persianate cultural dominance.