Priyasakhi Chiara Barchi is a PhD Candidate specializing in the Indian Ocean trade of South India in the early first millennium CE. Her dissertation examines the people who procured three of South India's most celebrated exports, pepper, ivory, and pearls, and asks why the harvesters, hunters, and divers who sustained this trade are almost absent from the sources. Reading Classical Tamil (Sangam) poetry as an archive of relationships between humans, animals, landscapes, and goods, alongside Greco-Roman sources such as the Periplus Maris Erythraei, she traces how courtly poets imagined these communities and what the poems' silences reveal about value, labor, and exchange between hinterland and coast.
She holds a BA cum laude in Archaeology and Asian and Middle Eastern Studies from Barnard College, Columbia University, where her senior thesis examined Greco-Indian hybrid identity and religious syncretism in Kushan-period Mathura. At ISAW, her interdisciplinary approach combines Classical Tamil philology, archaeology, and Greco-Roman textual analysis, building on a foundation in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrit. More broadly, she is interested in itinerant and diasporic identities, approached through a critical, post-national, post–area studies lens.
She is a member of the Berenike Project in Egypt and has worked with the Sīnīya Island project in Umm al-Quwain, UAE. After serving as ISAW's Exhibition Practicum Student in 2022, she held a Public Humanities Doctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art.
Areas of interest: Indian Ocean trade; Early Historic South India; Indo-Mediterranean trade; Classical Tamil literature; harvesters and hunters of the Western Ghats; producer and merchant identity in South India; museum education; cross-cultural exhibitions.