Tanuja Kothiyal is Assistant Professor in History at Ambedkar University, Delhi. Her area of research is the arid Thar desert in India, and its networks of mobility and circulation from the seventeenth century onwards.  Her doctoral thesis discussing mobility in the Thar desert is being published as Nomadic Narratives: A History of Mobility in the Great Indian Desert, by the Cambridge University Press (India). Kothiyal has explored the nature of human interaction and adaptation with arid geography and desert climate. Her current work is on vernacular texts produced between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, through which she intends to provide a regional perspective on the Mughal Empire. She has also been researching boundary settlements in nineteenth century Thar in order to understand the shifting nature of political formations in the Thar desert.