Daud Ali is an historian of pre-Mughal South Asia. His area of training and expertise is early medieval South Asia, but his research interests have expanded over the years. His research has focused on the history of mentalities and practices in pre-Sultanate South Asia, and he has published on a wide range of subjects, including: courtly and monastic discipline, mercantile practices, conventions in erotic poetry and courtship, slavery, ideas of space, time, and history in inscriptions, early Southeast Asian history, and, most recently, on gardens and landscape in the medieval Deccan. Future and ongoing projects include collaborative projects on the history of friendship in early and medieval South Asia, a translation of a Buddhist text on erotics, as well as a study of the production of the king Bhoja cycles in Western India.