In this second installment of our “10 Questions for the Historian of Science,” I interviewed Audrey Truschke about her research, the state and future of the history of science, and the position of her research and pubic engagement within broader global debates.
Audrey Truschke. Source: Audrey Truschke, 2025.
Ole Birk Laursen: What is your academic background?
Audrey Truschke: I am professor of South Asian history at Rutgers University-Newark, a public university in New Jersey, USA.
Ole Birk Laursen: What is the topic of your research and how did you become interested in this?
Audrey Truschke: The story of how I came to study South Asia is quite dull. I took a class in college on the Mahabharata, one of the two major Sanskrit Hindu epics. I found the story fascinating and confusing in equal measure and set out to better understand this epic, especially its treatment of ethics and the relationship between divinities and humans. While working on that, I found that my intellectual passion lay in South Asian cultural history broadly. I soon began learning Sanskrit, and thereafter turned my attention to Persian, Hindi, and Urdu. These days, I tend to return to a few broad themes recurrently in my scholarship, including the early modern Mughal Empire, modern Hindu nationalist imaginations of the past, and the construction of religious identities. Also, I still write about the Mahabharata sometimes.
Ole Birk Laursen: What are your working theories and methods?
Audrey Truschke: I work with both Sanskrit and Persian sources, which is an unusual combination for a South Asianist. I’ve always favored manuscript research, which I find thrilling and insightful. India’s historic archives are scattered across the subcontinent and far beyond. Accordingly, I’ve travelled widely to access Sanskrit and Indo-Persian manuscripts, from London to Paris to Lahore to Delhi to Doha. Of course, I’ll be doing manuscript work in Berlin, while I’m in town.
So far as my working theories, I believe in drawing widely on all available evidence, making grounded and nuanced claims, and always giving receipts. Living out that last point, my most recent book, India: 5,000 Years of History on the Subcontinent (Princeton University Press, 2025), features over 100 pages of notes and bibliography. I also believe in public-facing scholarship as an important part of the historian’s craft.
India: 5,000 Years of History on the Subcontinent. Source: Princeton University Press, 2025.
Ole Birk Laursen: How is your research situated within the field of the history of science?
Audrey Truschke: I am keenly interested in the production of knowledge within and about South Asia. In part, I research knowledge production in premodernity in areas ranging from translations of literary works to religious traditions to astrology. Case studies where Sanskrit, Persian, and political power intersect tend to especially pique my interest. Additionally, I am invested in thinking about contestations over present-day knowledge about the past, including Hindu nationalist projections of hard science into the ancient Indian past.
Ole Birk Laursen: What is the state of the history of science today?
Audrey Truschke: I’m unsure. I think we have enjoyed decades of flourishing in the humanities and social sciences broadly, including in the history of science. I fear that era may be coming to an end, although I hope I am wrong. Certainly, as a U.S.-based academic, our future does not look rosy.
Ole Birk Laursen: Why do we need to study the history of science?
Audrey Truschke: The history of science helps to tell us who we have been, including possibilities for human imagination and knowledge that are currently foreclosed to us. Recovering the broadest possible range of human activities and ways of thinking are core activities for any historian. Sometimes, I feel more at home in the past than the present, which I consider a professional hazard. But for most people, the past is a remote and unfamiliar place; appreciating those differences is critical to honoring and understanding history.
Ole Birk Laursen: What is the value and impact of your research today? How does it connect with contemporary debates in broader society?
Audrey Truschke: I sometimes think that my research connects a bit too much with contemporary debates, judging by the amount of hate mail and threats that I receive. Mainly, Hindu nationalists are the ones sending me hate mail. Hindu nationalism is a far-right political movement that is strong in both India and the United States. Hindu nationalists are upset with most of the major features of my scholarship, since they perceive me—as a historian who attempts to accurately represent history—as challenging their mythology of the past. They’re not wrong.
Ole Birk Laursen: Are there any unusual stories you have come across in your research? Anything that changed your perception of dominant historical narratives?
Audrey Truschke: I have come across some eye-popping stories in my research, for sure, although it can be difficult to present them without running the risk of readers fetishizing past societies. Vedic rituals that involved sexual activities come to mind. Honestly, what sticks with me is recurrent human suffering in the past. In researching my most recent book, India, I came across so many cases of premodern South Asian families—rich and poor—who had lost young children. Many historians don’t mention this; some have even argued that we ought to discount infant mortality in general mortality rates. I went the other way and brought up this deeply personal, yet socially common, grief multiple times in the book since it was a shaping force in the lives of so many over the millennia. Relatedly, probably the biggest historical narrative that I challenge in my recent India book is the assumption that we ought to narrate the past as a story of political struggles between kings. The men in charge mattered, but so did the oppressed and forgotten of history along with mundane subjects like what they ate, wore, thought, and believed. I attempt to offer a more comprehensive and thus richer history of the Indian subcontinent.
Ole Birk Laursen: What are your plans for future research?
Audrey Truschke: I am currently working on a book about the Mughal Emperor Akbar, who ruled northern India from 1556 and 1605. The book is a non-biography, since it does not focus on Akbar as an individual but rather as a head of state who brought together a variety of allies and groups to empire build. Ultimately, Akbar and his allies changed India irrevocably. I am using a wide variety of sources for the book, far beyond the standard line-up of Persian court chronicles. I think and hope that a more diverse archive will help us all understand Akbar’s place in South Asian history substantially differently moving forward.
Ole Birk Laursen: What is the future of the history of science?
Audrey Truschke: I wish I knew, but, then again, what fun would that be?
Ole Birk Laursen: Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions!