Kaitlin Emmanuel brings focus on Sri Lanka, Tamil diaspora, and object-based learning to Yale

For Emmanuel, objects can also help accommodate students with varied amounts of background knowledge in South Asian studies. She said many of her students had never taken courses on South Asia before, and she gained valuable insights from what caught their attention in the artworks. 

Emmanuel herself only became academically interested in the region during her senior year of undergraduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, when she took a postcolonial studies class outside the Art History department. While the renaissance period had initially drawn her to the history of art, it was that class which reoriented her art historical interests.

“The focus on the Tamil diaspora came from my own interest in parsing histories of war and displacement that I saw reflected in my own family across generations,” Emmanuel added.

These interests led Emmanuel to undertake her MA and later PhD at Cornell University, pursuits which felt “daunting” as a first-generation college student.

“I had very little understanding of what an academic, research-oriented career looks like,” Emmanuel explained. “So I’m very indebted to friends and mentors who guided me along the way.” 

At Yale, she found a new community of mentors. She praised historian Sunil Amrith’s research on the Bay of Bengal, which she had cited in the first paragraph of her dissertation. In particular, Emmanuel highlighted Amrith’s complication of the term “diaspora,” and his subversion of traditional binaries between homelands and destinations. This focus on interconnectedness is one often left out of regionally-divided art history classes, which Emmanuel hopes to help change. 

Amrith himself felt it was a “true pleasure” to have Emmanuel join the Council. “Kaitlin is a brilliant scholar at the cutting edge of South Asian Art History, and I enjoyed very much getting to know her work,” he added.

Along with Amrith, Emmanuel credited History of Art Professor Ned Cook for his willingness to help her develop syllabi that accounted for interactions across regions and stretched into the global sphere.

Throughout her time at Yale, Emmanuel has helped organize events at the Council, presented research and even taken classes. She audited a graduate methods seminar co-taught by Amrith and fellow historian Rohit De titled Readings in South Asia: Across the Disciplines and a scriptwriting class, the latter of which she characterized as an outlet for investigating how academic research lends itself to other genres of writing.

Emmanuel’s time at Yale has left her with new questions to explore in her book project, which she credited to learning from other South Asianists on campus and a wide range of opportunities to gain feedback on her work. She emphasized the Council’s “rich program of events” and its support for inviting scholars and practitioners relevant to her field, noting in particular her efforts to organize a talk by Nedra Rodrigo on Tamil translation and a screening and discussion with Tamil Canadian filmmakers Kalainithan and Kalaisan Kalaichelvan featuring their films “Junglefowl” and “Karupy.”

Emmanuel also delivered a talk as part of the South Asian Studies colloquium series  in which she discussed “History of Histories,” an artwork created by five Tamil Sri Lankan artists who collected objects from households across the Jaffna peninsula to shed light on life in a warzone. Amrith characterized her talk as a “moving and thought-provoking perspective on diasporic art in the aftermath of Sri Lanka’s Civil War.”

“There’s a lot of opportunity to dip your toes into academic service and how you might contribute to the study of South Asia on campus,” Emmanuel said of her experience as a Singh Fellow. “Yale has been such an amazing experience.”