Priyal Chitale

Priyal is a CHASE AHRC Doctoral Researcher and fourth-year PhD student in the Department of Music at SOAS. Her interdisciplinary doctoral project employs textual criticism, oral history interviews, and archival research to investigate the aural pleasures, politics, and poetics of the Hindustani film song c. 1947–80.

Broadly speaking, her research interests span the public culture of contemporary India; the modern subcontinental histories of emotion; and the sociocultural and political continuities and conjunctions between Persianate, colonial, and post-colonial South Asia.

She holds a BA in Film Studies from Vassar College, and two MAs from SOAS, the first in South Asian Area Studies and the second in Social Anthropology with Intensive Persian. Her native languages are English, Hindi, and Marathi, and her research languages include Urdu, Persian, and French.