Neha Vermani

Neha Vermani specialises in the cultural and intellectual history of early modern South Asia, focussing on the study of material culture, food and beverage practices, human-plant-animal encounters, and the histories of science and the senses. She is working on her first book, Tasting the Empire: Food, Body, and Connoisseurship in Mughal South Asia. It examines the mentality, knowledge systems, cross-cultural encounters, and labour regimes that shaped the ritualised and everyday food and drink consumption and preparation practices of the Mughal elite from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. 

This in-preparation monograph draws on her doctoral thesis completed at Royal Holloway University of London as well as her postdoctoral research on the Mellon Foundation-funded project Before ‘Farm to Table’: Early Modern Foodways and Cultures at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC, and as a British Academy Newton International Fellow at the Department of History, University of Sheffield. She is currently co-editing a volume Decoding Recipes: Knowledge and Practice across Space and Time, to be published by Brill.