Dr. Emma Kalb

Emma Kalb is a historian whose research interests center on themes of slavery, service, gender, and sexuality in early modern South Asia. Her current project focuses on eunuch slavery during the Mughal period (1526–1857), arguing for its critical importance for our understanding of elite life in early modern South Asia and the Islamicate world. The project explores how eunuchs were central both to the social life of elite households, particularly as mediators of interaction and access, as well as occasionally high-ranking imperial servitors whose lives speak to the complex incorporation of castrated slaves into the ranks of the Mughal elite.