Research Interests for Sumathi Ramaswamy

I am a cultural historian of South Asia and the British empire and my research over the last few years has been largely in the areas of visual studies, the history of cartography, and gender (see my recent book "The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India," published in 2010 by Duke University Press, and an edited volume from Routledge, also published in 2010, titled "Barefoot across the Nation: Maqbool Fida Husain and the Idea of India.") My work in popular visual history has also led me to co-establish Tasveerghar: A Digital Network of South Asian Popular Visual Culture at http://www.tasveerghar.net/. I am now pursuing a new research agenda on the cultures of learning in colonial and postcolonial India. In the first of the projects centered on this new research program titled "Global Itineraries: The Indian Travels of a Worldly Object," I explore the debates in colonial India about the shape and disposition of the earth in the universe and examine the course of science education. Another project titled "Giving and Learning: Philanthropy and Higher Education in Modern India," draws upon my experience as Program Officer for Education, Arts & Culture for the Ford Foundation in New Delhi (2002-2005). It charts the ethical and political impulses that governed new patterns of giving directed towards the establishment of colleges and universities across colonial India.

Recent Publications

1. S. Ramaswamy, Midnight's Line, in Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space, edited by Iftikhar Dadi and Hammad Nasar (March, 2012), Herbert F. Johnson Museum and Green Cardamom
2. S. Ramaswamy, Artful Mapping in Bazaar India, Tasveerghar: A Digital Archive of South Asian Popular Visual Culture (February, 2011) [html]
3. S. Ramaswamy, The Work of Goddesses in the Age of Mass Reproduction, in Transcultural Turbulences: Towards a Multi-Sited Reading of Image Flows., edited by Christiane Brosius and Roland Wenzlhuemer (2011), pp. 191-220, Springer Verlag
4. S. Ramaswamy, Barefoot across India: An Artist and his Country, in Barefoot across the Nation: Maqbool Fida Husain and the Idea of India, edited by S. Ramaswamy (2010), pp. 1-20, Routledge
5. S. Ramaswamy, Doing Pictorial History at the Roja Muthiah Research Library, Māṟṟuvēli, vol. 4 (2010), pp. 82-89