Dr. Haseena Naji is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Sciences and Languages at Vellore Institute of Technology, Chennai. In October 2023, she was awarded a PhD from the Central University of Tamil Nadu, Thiruvarur, for her thesis applying Vladimir Propp’s morphological framework alongside Ochs and Capps’ five-dimensional model of narrative to Kurichyan folksongs, demonstrating that indigenous oral narratives require culturally responsive analytical frameworks beyond universalist Western structural models.
Dr. Naji’s research interests lie at the intersection of structuralist narratology, indigenous narratives, and comparative folklore. Her work is grounded in sustained ethnographic fieldwork with the Kurichya tribe of Wayanad, Kerala, collecting, translating and interpreting their corpus of folksongs alongside the community’s broader ritual practices.
As a Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Elon University, Dr. Naji is conducting a comparative study of ritual speech among the Kurichya and the Gullah/Geechee of the southeastern United States. Both communities face pressures of ecological and cultural marginalization, making the comparison both theoretically significant and ethically urgent. The project tests whether a structuralist-performative framework, recalibrated to honor cultural specificity, can reveal how two distinct indigenous traditions encode memory, identity, and resilience through oral performance.