South Asian Studies Council and Inter-Asia Program Appoint Postdoctoral Fellows for 2013-2014
From the history of family relationships among Muslims in colonial India, to the Constructing the Indian Immigrant to Colonial Burma; from the presence of a Japanese NGO and its projects in Burma/Myanmar to that of the role of Marathi musical theater of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in shaping nationalism, popular culture, gender and class subjectivies, postdoctoral fellows appointed by the South Asian Studies Council and the Inter-Asia Program at the Macmillan Center in the 2013-2014 academic year bring fresh scholarship and a diverse range of expertise in the fields of anthropology, history and literature.
Asiya Alam finished her PhD from University of Texas, Austin in Spring 2013 under the joint guidance of Gail Minault and Syed Akbar Hyder. Her dissertation, “Marriage in Transition: Gender, Family and Muslim Social Reform in Colonial India” is a study of debates and discussions on family relationships particularly marriage within the Muslim community that were held during the colonial period from late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. Her analysis is based on a close reading of a variety of Urdu texts relating to gender and family, an exploration of debates in the Urdu women’s magazines particularly Tahzib-e Niswan and Ismat, and analysis of Urdu novels written by women during early twentieth century. In her research, she has identified and elaborated on four issues that were central to family reform: consent of both the bride and the groom, compatibility between husband and wife, polygyny and divorce.
Besides the history of family, she is also interested in autobiographies and their role in reshaping historical narratives. She is part of the larger network of ‘Women’s Autobiographies in Islamic societies’ organized by Siobhan Lambert-Hurley at Loughborough University and has presented at their conferences in Delhi and Sharjah. She is also interested in cultural and intellectual history especially of liberalism in South Asia. She has published in Modern Asian Studies and reviewed for The Indian Economic and Social History Review and Economic and Political Weekly. At Yale, she will be teaching History of Modern South Asia and Reinventing Gender in Modern India in Fall 2013 and Spring 2014.
Kedar A. Kulkarni received his PhD in Literature from UC San Diego and will join the South Asian Studies Council as a Postdoctoral Fellow and Associate. Kedar is particularly interested in modern Indian drama, film, and aesthetics in western India. His dissertation, entitled “Theatre and the Making of the Modern Indian Subject” focused on the way Marathi musical theatre was instrumental in producing modes of behavior and creating a new Indian subjectivity in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
At Yale, Kedar will revise parts of his dissertation and also develop some research projects that are tangentially related to his teaching. He will work with the maps department at the library to incorporate GIS into his analysis of itinerant theatre troupes and their circulation around western India, and develop another side project about early film in Bombay, since many of the early film actors and actresses were eminent stage personalities. In the fall of 2013, Kedar will teach a course on Modern Indian Drama; in spring 2014, a course on Hindi cinema.
Rajashree Mazumder, a postdoctoral associate with the Council, holds a Ph.D. in History from University of California, Los Angeles. Her dissertation is titled: “Constructing the Indian Immigrant to Colonial Burma 1885-1948.” Beyond India and Burma, she is interested in research questions related to networks of migration in the Indian Ocean arena both in the early modern and modern period. At Yale, Rajashree will offer a course titled Migration in the Indian Ocean Region during Fall 2013.
Chika Watanabe is a postdoctoral associate in the Inter-Asia Program at the Macmillan Center. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from Cornell University, where she researched Japanese aid ideologies, practices of “making persons” (hitozukuri), and the indistinction between the religious and the secular in a Japanese NGO and its projects in Burma/Myanmar. She has several publications in Japanese and English, the latest of which is an article in the Political and Legal Anthropology Review titled “Past Loss as Future?: The Politics of Temporality and the “Nonreligious” by a Japanese NGO in Burma/Myanmar.”
Tacking back and forth between aid work and academia, she has worked with Japanese and Burmese NGOs, and holds a Masters degree in Refugee Studies from Oxford University. Based on her fieldwork experiences across Japan and Burma/Myanmar, her work at Yale will include advancing Inter-Asian perspectives and teaching an undergraduate seminar titled Humanitarianism Across Asia. While keeping an eye on Burma/Myanmar, her next major project will examine aid practices in the aftermath of the March 2011 disasters in Japan. She grew up in Spain and Japan, and received her B.A. in Sociology/Anthropology from Swarthmore College.