Tamil Lecturer (Heisenberg Fellow) Torsten Tschacher, PhD

Torsten Tschacher is the Tamil lecturer at the South Asia Institute (currently on leave). He is a Heisenberg Fellow of the German Research Foundation (DFG) and is researching the role of Islam in the identity formation of mobile groups around the Bay of Bengal in the transition to colonial rule in the 18th-19th centuries in the project “The Conceptualization of Muslim Identity in the Bay of Bengal”. 

His research focuses on the history and literature of Islam in South India and Sri Lanka as well as the embedding of the Tamil-speaking regions of South India and Sri Lanka in the wider context of the Indian Ocean. He is also interested in legal history and community formation in the nexus of family and property around the Bay of Bengal, the intersections of concepts of caste, “race” and religion, and processes of vernacularization. 

Tschacher specializes in the teaching of the Tamil language (including special forms such as Arabic-Tamil) and literature, especially from the Middle Ages and modern times. He also teaches courses on the history of books and printing and on language ideologies and politics. He is currently working on a monograph on the history of Islamic literature and text cultures in the Tamil language. He also translates Tamil literature into German and English.