Jonathan Gil Harris is Professor of English at Ashoka University. He earned his Bachelors and Masters from Auckland University, and completed his DPhil from the University of Sussex. Prior to coming to Ashoka, he was a Professor at George Washington University, where he taught from 2003 to 2013. He has also held positions at Ithaca College, New York, and University of Auckland in New Zealand.
Professor Harris has long been interested in questions of globalisation, migration and the “foreign” in early modern cultures. His research interests include Shakespeare, including Indian adaptations, early modern English theatre and material culture, travel literature before the age of colonialism, “Indography” or early modern English writing about India, histories of disease and medicine, medieval and early modern Silk Road cultures, and global Jewish histories.
He is the author of many books, including Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 1998), Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism and Disease in Shakespeare’s England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), Shakespeare and Literary Theory (Oxford University Press, 2010), Marvellous Repossessions: The Tempest, Globalisation, and the Waking Dream of Paradise (Ronsdale, 2012), Indography: Writing the “Indian” in Early Modern England (Palgrave, 2013), The First Firangis: Remarkable Stories of Heroes, Healers, Charlatans, Courtesans, And Other Foreigners Who Became Indian (Aleph Book Company, 2015), and Masala Shakespeare: How A Firangi Writer Became Indian (Aleph Book Company, 2018).
Professor Harris is currently working on a book project titled The Jewish Silk Road: Secrets of My Mother’s Tea Chest (forthcoming, 2023). He is also a contributor to the Global Humanities Initiative project on “Migrant Ecologies” with Martin Crowley and Subha Mukherjee (Cambridge) and Sumana Roy (Ashoka University).
