Amy Bard currently teaches Hindi/Urdu at Wellesley and Urdu literature at Harvard, though she has taught at the University of Florida, Gainesville; Columbia; Harvard; and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She received her M.A., M. Phil., and her Ph.D. all from Columbia University.

Her research draws on literary sources and fieldwork in Pakistan and India to explore how gender, regional identity, and sectarian affiliations mediate poetic production, appreciation, and meaning in contemporary South Asia. She is especially interested in expressive traditions that gained prominence in the nineteenth or early twentieth century and still have vibrant performance contexts today. Bard has published chapters in Holy Tears: Weeping in the Religious Imagination (Princeton University Press, 2005) and other edited volumes. Her time and fieldwork in India and Bangladesh produced her book, He Made Me Light Up the Gathering: Women’s Piety, Poetry, and Performance in South Asian Shi‘i Islam.

In 2005, Bard was a Senior Fellow of the American Institute of Indian Studies, just after her Mellon Fellowship in Columbia University’s Society of Fellows. During this time, she served as a Journal of Asian Studies book review editor and an American Institute of Pakistan Studies trustee. She currently has a visiting fellowship at the Max Planck Institute’s Center for the History of Emotions, Berlin.