Meia Walravens is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Languages and Cultures, supported by the Special Research Fund (BOF). Her research aims to explain how transregional contexts shaped the history and historiography of Islamic polities and communities in the late medieval and early modern period. She combines a particular interest in the sultanates of central and north India with broader research questions that focus on connectivities across West, Central, and South Asia. Topics she has published on include: diplomacy, intellectual networks, historical audiences, language use, patronage, sultanic authority, and criminal justice.
Between 2022 and 2026, Meia Walravens was a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, University of Oxford. She completed her PhD in History at the University of Antwerp in 2022. Her doctoral thesis, Networked Diplomacy: Maḥmūd Gāwān’s Bahmani Sultanate and the Fifteenth-century Islamic World, received an honorable mention in the 2023 BRAIS Prize in the Study of Islam and the Muslim World. She is an Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Meia Walravens’ ongoing project examines how fifteenth-century Persian inshāʾ literature operated across regions from Anatolia to South Asia. She is also preparing her first monograph, which demonstrates the influence of transregional intellectual and family networks over the diplomatic relations of the Bahmani Sultanate in Deccan India.
