Department of History

Personal Statement:

I am interested in how Sylhetis in mid-20th century Assam, in North-East India, navigated their displacement and rehabilitation due to the Partition of India and Pakistan. Through archival and ethnographic research, I look at how urban planning, political economy and caste produce particular spatial orders and affective discourses of belonging differentially within the Sylhetis. From petition templates to cultural materials like food and folk music, I seek how the circulation of these ‘objects’ in their non-spectacular everyday sites show the work of collective memory and spatial ordering in the making of a citizen-subject within a very contested terrain of claims that marked the frontier region of North-East India.

Advisor: Mary Hancock, Anshu Malhotra

Awards & Professional Activities:

• Vice President- Advocacy, HGSA 2022-23
• Lead TA 2022-23 (with Misa Nguyen), History Department
• 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, 2021-23