Prof. Sumathi Ramaswamy is James B. Duke Professor of History, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. She has published extensively on language politics, gender studies, spatial studies and the history of cartography, visual studies and the modern history of art, and more recently, digital humanities and the history of philanthropy in modern India. She holds a master’s degree in History and MPhil in History from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi; a Master’s in Anthropology from University of Pennsylvania, and a PhD in History from the University of California (Berkeley). Prior to her appointment at Duke Univeristy, she taught at the University of Pennsylvania and University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Between 2002 and 2005, she also worked for the Ford Foundation in New Delhi as Program Officer for Education, Arts and Culture. Her monographs include Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India (1997); The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories (2004); The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India (2010), Husain’s Raj: Postcolonial Visions of Empire and Nation (2016); and Terrestrial Lessons: The Conquest of the World as Globe (2017). She is a co-founder of Tasveerghar: A Digital Network of South Asian Popular Visual Culture. Her most recent works are Gandhi in the Gallery: The Art of Disobedience (New Delhi: Roli Books), a digital project on children’s art titled B is for Bapu: Gandhi in the Art of the Child in Modern India, and a co-edited volume (with Monica Juneja) titled Motherland: Pushpamala N.’s Woman and Nation (New Delhi: Roli Books, 2022). She is currently working on a new project on educational philanthropy in British India.

Focusing on India’s first educational trust named Pachaiyappa’s Charities and on its connection to the man after whom it is named, Pachaiyappa Mudaliar (d. 1794), Prof. Ramaswamy’s Fulbright-Nehru project aims to chart the birth of educational philanthropy in nineteenth-century Tamil India. She analyzes the emergence of secular education as a desirable public good; the transformation in the age of colonial capital of ancestral ideas about virtuous giving; and the political, economic, and ethical motivations for philanthropic support for secular education. She also considers questions endemic to philanthropy about power and personal influence as she delineates the role of private wealth in underwriting public education.