Chris Diamond
Contributor for South Asian studies
Dr. Chris Diamond is Lecturer in Hindi in the School of Culture, History, and Language (CHL) in the College of Asia & the Pacific (CAP) at the Australian National University. He is also the Deputy-Director of ANU’s South Asia Research Institute (SARI) and the Co-Founder of ANUBhasha, a collective of digital philologists working on premodern South Asia at the ANU. Chris’ current project, based on his doctoral dissertation completed in 2019 at the University of Washington (Seattle, USA), focuses on the Maithili lyric poetry of the 15th century polymath-poet Vidyapati. Chris is looking at the construction of a new vernacular literary cosmopolis that emerged through an interplay of caste, masculinity, music, and memory across several small royal courts in North India and Nepal from the 15th to 19th centuries CE. As part of this project, Chris is also working on producing digitised and interactive editions of several Maithili songbook manuscripts from Nepal. Chris works across several languages, including Hindi-Urdu, Bengali, Sanskrit, Maithili, Braj Bhasha, Avadhi, Apabhramsha, and Persian. Chris lives with his husband and cat in Canberra, Australia.
The Digital Orientalist 