Geeta Patel is an associate professor of gender and women’s studies and Middle Eastern and South Asian languages and cultures at the University of Virginia. Her book Lyrical Movements, Historical Hauntings: Gender, Colonialism and Desire in Miraji’s Urdu Poetry (2002), focusing on a renegade writer, Miraji, reads gender and sexuality in twentieth-century Urdu poetic movements that emerge out of the lyric of loss. She has translated widely from prose and poetry composed in Sanskrit, Urdu, Hindi, Braj, and Awadhi. Her current project, Insuring Selves, Assuring a Future: The Poetics of Finance, on insurance, pensions, transnational capital, rights, and state formations (from 1750–2002) in South Asia, works through gender to grapple with the liaisons between capital, subjectivity, and loss.