Personal Statement:
I am interested in quotidian processes of state and citizen making in post-Partition India, particularly amongst the Sylheti community of postcolonial Assam. Through archival and ethnographic research, I assess how micro-processes of urban planning schemes, political economy and caste produce particular spatial orders and affective discourses of belonging differentially within the Sylhetis. Through ethnography, I also look at cultural material like food and folk music in their non-spectacular everyday sites to see the work of collective memory and spatial ordering in the making of a citizen-subject with a contested terrain of claims.
Advisor: Mary Hancock, Anshu Malhotra
Awards & Professional Activities:
- History Department Recruitment Fellowship, 2019-20
- Graduate Fellow of Public Humanities at the Interdisciplinary Humanities Centre
- History Associates Summer Research Fellowship, 2021
- History Department Travel and Research Grant, 2022
- William H. Ellison Prize for Best Seminar Paper, 2022 : “Spatial Orders and the Affective Architecture of a new Nation: Making of the Burrabazar Colony for Displaced Sylhetis in post-Partition Shillong”
- GSR (Graduate Student Representative) Diversity, Equity, Inclusion Committee, History Department
- Graduate Intern, IT Community Relations, Department of History