Dr. Shaifali Arora is a scholar of colonial and postcolonial South Asian history, with a particular interest in the cultural and linguistic history of the 1947 Partition of India. Her research examines how histories of displacement are remembered, reworked, and transmitted through everyday practices, with a particular focus on Punjab.
Dr. Arora received her PhD in English from the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Technology Indore. She holds an MA and MPhil in English and a BA (Hons) in English from Sri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi. She has also qualified the UGC-NTA NET in English. She received the Alliance of Digital Humanities Bursary Award to visit McGill University, Canada, in 2017 and the ASEM-DUO Fellowship to visit Lancaster University, UK, in 2020.
Dr. Arora’s research papers have been published in international journals such as South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies (Taylor & Francis) and Contemporary South Asia (Taylor & Francis).
As a Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Dr. Arora will document and analyze the culinary practices of refugees from regions such as Bahawalpur and Multan, focusing on how food functions as a living archive of displacement, resilience, and gendered memory. Her project is significant as South Asian Studies programs in the US are increasingly foregrounding micro-histories, gendered narratives, and diasporic memory in understanding Partition. This project will illustrate how domestic culinary practices serve as cultural repositories, particularly among women whose roles as preservers and transmitters of subregional identities through food remain critically underexplored.