Walter Hakala

Associate Professor, Director, Asian Studies Program
Office: 315 Clemens Hall
Phone number: (716) 645-3419
E-mail address: walterha@buffalo.edu
Personal web page: http://ubwp.buffalo.edu/southasiaatub

Literature and languages of North India and Central Asia; lexicography; Mughal and early colonial South Asian history; South Asian Islam, Sufism and epigraphy

• “Vernacular Literacy and the Urdu Public Text,” a book-length study of the Urdu language through inscriptions, and other non-paper sources
• “Two New Kinds of Fire: Syphilis and Capsicum in Early Hindvi Vocabularies,” forthcoming in Objects, Images, Stories: Simon Digby’s Historical Method, edited by Francesca Orsini
• “Steingass’s Comprehensive Persian–English Dictionary and the Rise and Fall of Persian as a Transregional Language,” forthcoming in The Whole World in a Book: Dictionaries in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Sarah Ogilvie and Gabriella Safran (Oxford University Press). 
• (with Lisa Mitchell) “The Lexicography of the Languages of South Asia from c. 1750 to Present,” forthcoming in The Cambridge World History of Lexicography, edited by John Considine

• “Ajay Čand-nāma,” in Perso-Indica. An Analytical Survey of Persian Works on Indian Learned Traditions, edited by Fabrizio Speziale and Carl W. Ernst (2018).
• Negotiating Languages: Urdu, Hindi, and the Definition of Modern South Asia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016; New Delhi: Primus Books, 2017. Awarded the Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize in the Indian Humanities, American Institute of Indian Studies, 2015.​
• “From Sepoy to Film Star: Indian Interpreters of an Afghan Mythic Space,” Modern Asian Studies 50, no. 5 (2016): 1501-1546.
• “The Authorial Problem in the _Khāliq Bārī_ of ‘Khusrau’.” Indian Economic & Social History Review 51, no. 4 (2014):481-96.
• “A Sultan in the Realm of Passion: Coffee in Eighteenth-Century Delhi.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 47, no. 4 (2014), pages 371-88.
• A Masnavi in Praise of Coffee: [Prepared] at the bidding of Nawab ‘Umdat Al-Mulk Amir Khan Bahadur by Shah Hatim (1699-1783).”  Translated with M.A. Naru. Eighteenth-Century Studies 47, no. 4 (2014), pages 425-27.
• “On Equal Terms: The Equivocal Origins of an Early Mughal Indo-Persian Vocabulary.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (Third Series) 25, no. 2 (2015): 209-27.
• "Languages as a Key to Understanding Afghanistan's Cultures."  Education About Asia 17, no. 2 (2012), pages 42-46. Republished in 2014 as part of the National Geographic Online Education Collection.
  
• "Locating ‘Pashto’ in Afghanistan: A Survey of Secondary Sources." Language Policy and Language Conflict in Afghanistan and its Neighbors, edited by Harold Schiffman, and Brian Spooner, 53-88. Leiden: Brill, 2012.

• University at Buffalo Office of the Vice President for Research and Economic Development & Humanities Institute Research Funding in the Arts & Humanities, 2019-2020
• University at Buffalo Baldy Center Research Grant, 2018-2019
• University at Buffalo Experiential Learning Network Faculty Fellow, 2018-2019
• Short-term Senior Fellowship in Iranian Studies, American Institute of Iranian Studies, 2018
• Honorable Mention, Bernard S. Cohn Book Prize, South Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies, 2018
• UB Exceptional Scholar Award for Young Investigators, 2017
• UB President Emeritus and Mrs. Meyerson Award for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching and Mentoring, 2017
• The Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize in the Indian Humanities, American Institute of Indian Studies, 2015
• Faculty Fellow, Honors College, 2015-2017
• University at Buffalo Office of the Vice President for Research / Humanities Institute Seed Money in the Arts and Humanities Fund, 2015
• University at Buffalo Office of the Vice President for Research/Humanities Institute Faculty Fellowship, fall 2013.

Curriculum Vitae:
http://bit.ly/HakalaCV