Head of Department Prof. Dr. Hans Harder

Hans Harder has been working as the Professor of Modern South Asian Languages and Literatures at the South Asia Institute since 2007. Previously, he studied South Asian Studies at the universities of Hamburg and Heidelberg and completed his PhD and postdoc at Martin Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg. His research and teaching interests include modern South Asian literatures (particularly Bengali), nineteenth and twentieth-century religious movements, colonial and postcolonial intellectual history as well as popular literature and film.

He is the author of several books, including Fiktionale Träume in ausgewählten Prosawerken von zehn Autoren der Bengali- und Hindiliteratur, Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay's Śrīmadbhagabadgītā: Translation and Analysis, Der verrückte Gofur spricht. Mystische Lieder aus Ostbengalen,  Sufism and Saint Veneration in Contemporary Bangladesh The Maijbhandaris of Chittagong, and Verkehrte Welten. Bengalische Satiren aus dem kolonialen Kalkutta. 

Among the many volumes he has edited are Looking at the Coloniser: Exploring Cross-Cultural Perceptions in Middle Asia, the Caucasus, and Bengal (co-edited with Beate Eschment), Literature and Nationalist Ideology: Writing Histories of Modern Indian Languages, Asian Punches: A Transcultural Affair (co-edited with Barbara Mittler), Literary Sentiments in the Vernacular: Gender and Genre in Modern South Asia (co-edited with Charu Gupta, Laura Brueck, and Shobna Nijhawan), Language Ideologies and the Vernacular in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia (co-edited with Nishat Zaidi) etc. His most recent book is The Vernacular: Three Essays on an Ambivalent Concept and Its Uses in South Asia (2024), co-authored with Nishat Zaidi and Torsten Tschacher.