Biography
I am a historian of modern South Asia, the Soviet Union, and the global Cold War. My dissertation, “Books from the U.S.S.R.: Soviet Publishing, Indian Nation Building, and the Cultural Cold War in Print, 1951-1991,” charts the meteoric rise of this multilingual Soviet book-reading culture in India at the crossroads of decolonization and the global Cold War. Challenging the longstanding “books as weapons” paradigm, which foregrounds propagandistic intentions and overlooks reader agency and social effects, it demonstrates how generations of Indian readers derived pleasure, knowledge, and inspiration from mass-produced books from the USSR. To explain this enthusiasm, I analyze new archival evidence from Russia and India, including a multilingual corpus of letters that Indian readers sent to Soviet publishing houses. Applying insights from reader-response criticism, translation studies, and the sociology of reading to my analysis of these sources, I argue that Soviet books in translation broke down linguistic, socio-economic, and stylistic barriers to learning and literacy. I contend that in doing so they contributed to the spread of education, technical-scientific knowledge, and the development of regional languages and literatures in post-colonial India.
My dissertation research has been supported through numerous private and federal grants, including awards from the Social Science Research Council IDRF (funding rate 7%), the U.S. Dept. of Education Fulbright-Hays (funding rate 10%); the Council on Library and Information Resources Mellon Fellowship (funding rate 6%); and the American Councils Title VIII Research Scholar Program. My language training in Hindi, Urdu, and Bengali has been funded through Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) grants, Critical Language Scholarships from the U.S. Department of State, and the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies.
I joined the Society of Scholars at the Simpson Center for the Humanities in 2021. I was also selected for a short-term research fellowship at the New York Public Library where I will explore the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture’s vast collection of Soviet books on Afro-Asian solidary and liberation movements.
I am committed to public scholarship and digital history. In 2017 I launched Bollywood and Bolsheviks: Indo-Soviet Collaboration in Literature and Film, 1954-1991, an exhibit at Suzzallo and Allen Libraries, University of Washington. You can read about it here. This project also involved the development of an oral history archive and documentary films, which were selected and screened at the 3rd i International Film Festival.
I have received extensive training in data collection, analysis, and visualization as well as text encoding practices. Between 2015 and 2017 I was also involved in the Information and Communication Technology for Development Lab’s Change project. This innovative imitative brought together faculty and students from the University of Washington to collaborate on and explore the challenges of developing technology in the context of positive social change.