Abdul Manan Bhat

Abdul Manan is a fourth year PhD Candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where he specializes in Sufism in Persianate societies, Urdu and Persian poetry, and Islamic sociality in South Asia. His dissertation, tentatively titled "Sensing Persianate: Poems, Performance, Islamic Adab in the 20th Century", explores Urdu and Persian poetry and its performance across northern India, Pakistan and Afghanistan as a site of conceptualizing sensory and discursive dimensions of Islamic adab in the 20th century. His project puts in conversation the careers of the Afghan poet Khalilullah Khalili (d.1987) and the Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz (d.1984). He works primarily in Persian and Urdu, secondarily in Arabic, Hindi and Kashmiri, and he is currently studying Pashto. Abdul Manan is a Penn Presidential PhD Fellow. 

Abdul Manan received his B.A in Religious Studies and International Affairs from Lafayette College, where he wrote about Islamic imagery in 20th century Urdu poetry, focusing on the corpus of Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Abdul was born and brought up in Kashmir.