Margrit Pernau

Margrit Pernau is a Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development's Center for the History of Emotions and an extraordinary Professor at Freie Universität Berlin. Her work bridges Indian history (18th-20th centuries), modern Islamic history, historical semantics, translation studies, and the history of emotions.

• Education: PhD in Modern History from University of Heidelberg (1991), Habilitation from University of Bielefeld (2007)
• Key Research: Focuses on emotional temporalities, transnational history, and the interplay between language and affect in South Asian contexts

Current projects include Feeling for the Future (South Asia 1912-1970) and The Emotions of New Education (Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi). She has supervised doctoral projects on topics like Mappila print culture, Bengali Muslim linguistic nationalism, and Amroha's social stratification in colonial North India.

Her recent publications explore emotional synchronization, decolonizing theory, and monsoon-related affective patterns. As co-editor of Emotions and Temporalities, she investigates how emotional frameworks shape historical periodization and political mobilization.

Students under her supervision have examined:

• Rampur's Minority Pasts (Razak Khan)
• Libya's Anticolonial Rewriting of National History (Jakob Krais)
• Amroha's Genealogy and Past Narration (Soheb Niazi)
• Kerala's Mappila Print Culture (Muhammed Niyas Ashraf)
• Early 20th century Bengali Muslim Linguistic Identity (Deborshi Chakraborty)