Lisa Mitchell
Philadelphia, PA| Grant Category: | Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Research) |
| Project Title: | The History of the Government Job in India |
| Field of Study: | History |
| Home Institution: | University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA |
| Host Institution: | English and Foreign Language University, Hyderabad, Telangana |
| Grant Start Month: | December 2025 |
| Duration of Grant: | Six months |
Brief Bio:
Dr. Lisa Mitchell is professor in the Department of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses in anthropology, history, and urban studies. She is the author of Hailing the State: Indian Democracy between Elections (Duke University Press, 2023, and Permanent Black, 2023) and Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue (Indiana University Press, 2009, and Permanent Black, 2010), which received the Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize in the Indian Humanities from the American Institute of Indian Studies. She is currently working on two book projects, one titled “The Government Job in India” and the second on translations of transnationally circulating political ideas, provisionally entitled, “The Multiple Genealogies of Indian Democracy: Global Intellectual History in Translation”. She received her PhD in sociocultural anthropology from Columbia University. Previously, she taught history at Queens College (CUNY), Bowdoin College, and the University of Washington, and anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Mellon Foundation, the European Research Council, and the American Institute of Indian Studies, and has been a visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge, a Mercator Visiting Fellow in Global Intellectual History at the Freie Universität in Berlin, and a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. In 2020, she was a recipient of the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching at the University of Pennsylvania.
Dr. Mitchell’s Fulbright-Nehru project is examining the idea of the government job in the history of political imagination in modern India. Using archives from the Nizam’s state of Hyderabad and Indian constitutional debates, cinematic and literary portrayals of civil servants, and oral histories from current and former government employees, it is tracing historical efforts to redistribute employment opportunities, create a new middle class, and offer guaranteed employment as a form of social welfare. Assessing India’s unique social experiments in the redistribution of opportunity, the project will culminate in a book-length anthropological history of the government job in India.