Divya Cherian is a historian of South Asia interested in the making and unmaking of embodied difference.  She focuses on the history of western India after 1700, studying both the pre-colonial and colonial periods, with an attention to trans-regional and global scales. Her first book, Merchants of Virtue: Hindus, Muslims, and Untouchables in Eighteenth-Century South Asia (University of California Press/Navayana, 2023), offers a history of caste and untouchability in pre-colonial, early modern India. She teaches South Asian history at Princeton.