History Archives - Page 2 of 2

Dr. Sucharita Sen is interested in the politics of everyday life beyond the conventional epicenters of power, with her research methodologically anchored at the intersection of history and political anthropology. She completed her Ph.D. in 2022 from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Dr. Sen is a recipient of the Walter L. Arnstein prize for the Best Ph.D. Paper at the 68th annual Midwest conference on British Studies (a regional affiliate of the North American conference on British Studies), 2021, the prize for the Best Ph.D. Paper at the 2021 biennial conference of the New Zealand Historical Association, and a Certificate of Excellence from Oxford University Press (India) for being the winning contributor of the December (2021) issue of Tell Me Your Story Review. Her works have appeared in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Contemporary South Asia, Society and Culture in South Asia and Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities.

Currently, Dr. Sen is co-editing the December 2025 (special) issue of the New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, and a post-conference edited volume (with Sekhar Bandyopadhyay) comprising selected papers from the ones presented at an international conference which she convened at the University of Auckland in September 2023.

Dr. Sen is working on her first monograph. The project examines, within the frameworks of affect theory and the critiques of Orientalism, a world of intimate power vis-à-vis official animosities in British India. The monograph revises her Ph.D. thesis, brings in additional materials, and rewrites the already published materials afresh. She also plans to co-convene an international conference with the support of her mentor at OSU. The conference will specifically boost Indo-U.S. collaboration in the field of South Asian Studies.

Ashutosh Kumar is an Associate Professor of History at Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India. He earned his Ph.D. from the History Department of the University of Delhi, where he also taught from 2012 to 2014. He received South-South Exchange Program for Research on the History of Development (SEPHIS), a Government of Netherlands funded program Fellowship during his Ph.D. He was fellow at the University of Leeds, United Kingdom; Yale University, USA; Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi; the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi, and at Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla. He is president of Indian Association for South Asian Studies (IASAS) and Chairman of Centre for Alternative Studies in Social Sciences, New Delhi.

His most recent publications include Coolies of the Empire: Indentured Indians in the Sugar Colonies, 1830-1920’, Cambridge University Press, 2017 and ‘Girmitiyas and Global Indian Diaspora: Origins, Memories and Identities’ Cambridge University Press, 2023.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence scholar, Dr. Kumar is exploring issue of rights of Indian indentured laborers on colonial sugar plantations during nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the letters, petitions and depositions of indentured Indian migrants with a particular emphasis on the letters they wrote in regional Indian language. His project analyses such laborers’ letters and makes the case that Indian indentured laborers were able to fight for their “rights”, natural and contractual with planters and the colonial government through petitions, in addition to being able to voice their feelings and concerns on a variety of other matters.