Amber Elisabeth Peters
Amber Elisabeth Peters is a doctoral student in the double-degree program at Heidelberg University and Ca' Foscari University of Venice under the supervision of Dr. Thomas Dähnhardt and Prof. Hans Harder. Her research centres on the text and illustration of the seventeenth-century Dakhni Urdu Sufi romance, the Gulshan-i Ishq, by Bijapur court poet, Nusrati. She uses an interdisciplinary approach that looks at a defined corpus from multiple angles. Amber completed her undergraduate degree from the University of Toronto, majoring in Near and Middle Eastern Civilisations with minors in Diaspora Studies and Environmental Biology. Her Master of Arts was completed at the University of Alberta in Modern Languages and Cultural studies under the supervision of Dr. Irene Sywenky and Dr. Manijeh Mannani. Her MA thesis was titled The Tale of the Buraq's Tail: Reading the Buraq's Journey Through Indo-Persian Literature in a Comparative Study of Buraq Imagery.
Amber studies cultural history and intellectual history of the Deccan in order to understand the art, literature, architecture, and religion in the region. She works primarily with Urdu and Dakhni as well as Persian language sources.
Doctoral Research
Project titel: God’s Universe, Nusrati’s World: Wandering through the Environments of Nusrati's Aesthetic World in 17th Century Dakhni Mathnawi, Gulshan-e Ishq (Garden of Love)
Amber Elisabeth Peters’ doctoral research centres on the text and illustration of the seventeenth-century Dakhni Urdu Sufi romance, the Gulshan-i Ishq, by Bijapur court poet, Nusrati. Her study seeks to illuminate the world that Nusrati created in his text as the protagonist, Manohar, journeys from his palace, to the ocean, to the forest, to the garden, and back. Her work uses both historical information to understand Nusrati’s poetry while using Nusrati’s poetry to understand his historical milieu. The text of the Gulshan is filled with allusions\; to literature, especially Persian romances; to history, such as the story of Alexander the Great; and to Philosophy, including Sufi Metaphysics. These disparate elements are united in a fantasy environment reminiscent of Nusrati’s local, South Indian context. Nusrati’s intense description of physical space adds to the aesthetic sense of embodiment and emotionality in the text, responding to the literary theory of rasa formed in the subcontinent. Amber’s work combines analysis of both image and text to illuminate our understanding of Nusrati, his literature, and the Deccan Sultanate in which he lived.