Dr Hajnalka Kovacs

Senior Lecturer in Classical Persian and Persian Literature

Dr Hajnalka Kovacs is a scholar of Persian and Urdu language and literature, specialising in the literary and intellectual traditions of the Persianate world. Her research examines the relationship between literary aesthetics and religious thought, with particular attention to the poetry and mystical thought of the seventeenth-century Indo-Persian poet Mīrzā ʿAbd al-Qādir Bedil. Her wider interests include Persianate literary culture, textual scholarship and translation.

Dr Kovacs has extensive teaching experience in language and literature. At Harvard University, she was Preceptor in Hindi and Urdu in the Department of South Asian Studies, where she taught language and literature from introductory to advanced levels, alongside courses in Indo-Persian literature. She has also advised and examined doctoral students working on Persian, Urdu and Hindi literature and the intellectual history of South Asia. Her previous teaching and research posts include Stanford University, the University of Chicago and Duke University, as well as postdoctoral research at the Forum Transregionale Studien and Freie Universität Berlin.

She holds a PhD and MA in South Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago, an MA in Iranian Studies from Eötvös Loránd University, and an MA in Urdu from Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.

At The Classical Institute, Dr Kovacs teaches Classical Persian, with an emphasis on grammar, speaking, reading, translation and close engagement with the Persian classical textual tradition.

Selected Publications

  • “The Preface to the Razmnāmah,” in Translation and State: The Mahābhārata at the Mughal Court (De Gruyter, 2022).

  • “Challenges of and Strategies for Translating Indo-Persian Poetry: The Case of Bedil (1644–1720),” in The Routledge Handbook of Persian Literary Translation (Routledge, 2022).

  • “The Circulation of the Astonishing Cup: The Many Facets of Wine Imagery in Bedil’s Sāqīnāma, Muḥīṭ-i Aʿẓam,” in Passed around by a Crescent: Wine Poetry in the Literary Traditions of the Islamic World (2022).

  • “‘No Journey is Possible Outside of the Heart’: The Story of King Lavaṇa in Bedil’s Muḥīṭ-i Aʿẓam,” Journal of South Asian Intellectual History 2 (2019).

  • “The Ocean Contained Within: The Semantic and Metaphysical Horizons of the ‘Waves of the Pearl’ (mawj-i gawhar) in Bēdil’s Ghazals,” forthcoming (2027).