Rutgers University Archives

Dr. Preetha Mani received her BA from Tufts University and her MA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Mani is associate professor of South Asian literatures in the Department of African, Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Literatures (AMESALL) and core faculty member in the program in comparative literature at Rutgers University. She is the author of The Idea of Indian Literature: Gender, Genre, and Comparative Method (Northwestern University Press and Permanent Black, 2022). Her research expertise lies in modern Hindi, Tamil, and Indian literatures, and she has published widely on issues of translation, women’s writing, and feminism in India; literary realism and modernism; postcolonial studies; and world literature. She has also published translations of Hindi and Tamil literature, autobiography, and criticism into English. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, American Institute of Indian Studies, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Fulbright.

Dr. Mani’s Fulbright-Nehru project is examining Tamil new poetry, a form of modernist free verse that became popular in 1950s’ magazines and set a benchmark against which later poets defined their work. By the 1980s, new poetry writing had democratized the poetic form. Exploring new poetry’s development in print culture, she is proposing that this genre was a primary avenue for writers to cross ideological boundaries and to draw inspiration from each other and from writers in other Indian and world languages. Dr. Mani’s research is attempting to demonstrate that rather than being a linguistic outlier to the national canon, Tamil new poetry was a means for generating ideas for a postcolonial pan-Indian literature built on the poetic form.

Prof. David Ghertner received his BA from Colby College and MA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. He is an associate professor in the Department of Geography at Rutgers University where he previously served as the director of the South Asian Studies Program. He is the author of Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi (Oxford University Press, 2015) and co-editor of Futureproof: Security Aesthetics and the Management of Life (Duke University Press, 2020) and Land Fictions: The Commodification of Land in City and Country (Cornell University Press, 2021). His research expertise lies in urban geography, and he has published widely on informal housing, property rights, urban aesthetics, and environmental governance. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Social Science Research Council, Fulbright, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

A series of digital property reform programs are currently spreading across rural India, utilizing drone mapping and digital technologies to map, title, and enclose landholdings. Digitized property rights are deemed essential to fighting poverty and fostering rural development, but also face technical and political challenges that vary by region and land tenure. The translation of customary rights, bordering of land, and construction of data infrastructure depend upon complex bureaucratic work. Through ethnographic research involving engineers and bureaucrats who are implementing the reforms in Goa and Delhi NCR and by interacting with residents impacted by these reforms, Prof. David Ghertner’s Fulbright-Nehru project is exploring how digital property is reconstituting landownership in India.