Co-Directors
Dr Shubranshu Mishra
I am a Lecturer in Politics and International Relations. My research interests lie at the intersection of three fields: first, the project of decolonising knowledge to bring to light the colonial and postcolonial aspects of global politics and address the perils of hegemonic structures in the discipline; second, the biopolitical turn in social sciences to understand and elucidate the ways in which governments become adjudicators of questions of the life and death of citizens through various regulatory apparatuses; and third, to understand the empirical implications of decolonising and biopolitical projects.
Dr Kalathmika Natarajan
As a historian of modern South Asia, my research and teaching interests bring together the fields of migration studies, diplomatic history, and imperial and global history. I am interested in critical, bottom-up approaches to diplomatic history: I am currently working on a manuscript provisionally titled ‘Coolie’ Migrants and the Making of Indian Diplomacy, which seeks to recover the figure of the migrant as central to the making of postcolonial diplomacy. My research has also been concerned with the intersections of caste and mobility – an effort to address the studied amnesia over caste in the scholarship on diplomatic history and international relations.
PGR members
Staff members
Prof. Nandini Chatterjee
I am a historian of South Asia. I work on law and cultural exchanges in the British and Mughal empires – with particular attention to religion and family. My first book was on the shaping on the minority religious community of Indian Christians, through legal, political, racial and theological contests over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My second book is a rare micro-history of a landed lineage and their negotiation of the laws of the Mughal empire.
I have a long-standing interest in Digital Humanities, and in making historical research materials widely available. When studying the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, erstwhile final court of appeal of the British empire, I created an online catalogue of historic Privy Council papers in collaboration with Dr Charlotte Smith of Reading University, and the Digital Humanities Lab at the University of Exeter.
Dr Rakesh Banerjee
Rakesh joined the Department of Economics, University of Exeter in September 2019. Prior to this he was Rice Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Baker Institute for Public Policy, Rice University.
His main research interest is development economics. His main focus is on issues of early life health care in developing countries. He also works on political economy and education in developing countries.
Dr Surajeet Chakravarty
Surajeet’s interests include contract theory, allocation mechanisms and banking. His interest in contract theory is specifically in cases when contracting parties are unable to verify the outcome. His interest in contract theory extends to contract law, tort law and corporate law analysis.
Dr Ranita Chatterjee
I am a Lecturer in Film and Television Studies. My research is interdisciplinary and intersects film history, theory and practice. My research interests include film history; twentieth century screen cultures; the cinemas of India; colonial film in the British Empire; creative industries and transnational film circulation. I am currently completing a book length manuscript entitled ‘Calcutta Chronicles: Film, City and the Transnational Journeys of early Indian Cinema.’
Professor Jerri Daboo
I worked professionally as a performer and director for fifteen years, before taking up the position of Lecturer in Exeter in 2004. My work moves across forms of theatre, music, dance, and popular culture in a range of different contexts.
My research and teaching focus on performance and culture in diverse contexts and practices. I have been working on a number of projects researching the histories, cultures, and performance forms of the British South Asian communities, and transnational connections with the Indian subcontinent.
Dr Ahmed Dailami
I am a historian of the Modern Middle East, with a broad interest in the history of political thought as well as conceptual and intellectual history. I pursue these interests with a particular geographic focus on the Arabian Peninsula and its political and social history in the 20th century. This includes histories of statehood, anti-colonial movements, and revolution, particularly in relation to broader contexts of the wider Arab World, Iran and South Asia. I am also involved in work on the history of liberalism, sovereignty and violence in the Middle East after the Cold War.
Dr Deborah McFarlane
Deborah’s research focuses on how ordinary communities survive and navigate protracted violent conflict. In particular, she works on the civil war in Sri Lanka and how in the war-affected north and east people developed and used forms of religious authority to create spaces outside of the major conflict dynamics through which to pursue political, social and humanitarian goals. Beneath this empirical focus, Deborah is interested in the ways in which religion and politics are conceptualised as binary forces and how this stymies our ability to understand how these fields constitute one another and interact in practice in post-colonial, conflict affected settings and prevent policy actors from fully recognising and engaging with the ambivalent potentials of religious actors and institutions.
Professor Maria Fusaro
My research and teaching interests lie in the social and economic history, interpreted in its broadest sense, of Early Modern Europe.
My primary area of expertise is the history of Italy (especially the Venetian Republic) and the Mediterranean between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. My research has focused on commercial networks and the role they played in the early phases of globalization; on the economic, social and cultural analysis of late medieval and early modern empires and on the early modern development of legal institutions supporting trade.
Professor Regenia Gagnier
Professor Regenia Gagnier’s specialisms include Victorian and modern Britain, especially the Fin de Siècle; the geopolitics of language and literature migration; digital humanities; literary and social theory; sex, gender and sexuality; interdisciplinary studies, esp. science and technology; and women in the professions.
Professor Ayesha Mukherjee
My research interests lie in the field of early modern literature and cultural history, particularly, the literature and history of famine and dearth. I am currently working on a monograph provisionally titled Placing Famine: Cultural and Medical Geographies of Dearth in India and Britain, 1550-1700. Both the edited book and the current book in progress are based on my recently completed AHRC project Famine and Dearth in India and Britain, 1550-1800, which produced a web-database in collaboration with colleagues from Jadavpur University and Aligarh Muslim University in India, and the Exeter Digital Humanities team. At present, I lead the Impact Follow-on project Famine Tales from India and Britain, also funded by the AHRC.
Professor Catriona Pennell
I am a historian of 19th and 20th century British and Irish history with a particular focus on the social and cultural history of the First World War and British imperial activity in the Middle East since the 1880s. I am intrigued by the experiences and recollections of ordinary people and communities in global war, as well as the on-going (and often bloody) relationship between current conflict and imperial pasts.
Professor Sajjad Rizvi
I’m an intellectual historian who is interested in the course of philosophy in the Islamic world both past and present. Increasingly I am interested in how that study and category of philosophy coincides with the emergent category of global philosophy. In terms of method, my research is informed by the need for a decolonial and reparative study of Islam.
I supervise graduate students broadly in Islamic intellectual history, especially in philosophy, theology and Quranic exegesis. I am the director of the Centre for the Study of Islam.
Dr Andrew Rudd
I research and teach British literature of the eighteenth century and Romantic period. My monograph, Sympathy and India in British Literature 1770-1830 (Palgrave Macmillan), was published in 2011, and I am currently writing a cultural history of charity in the eighteenth century. This builds on experience I acquired as Parliamentary Manager at the Charity Commission for England and Wales before joining Exeter in 2013.
Dr Gajendra Singh
My research is focused upon histories of colonialism in South Asia. I have particular interests in the hybridities of Empire – of the networks of peoples and ideas that could make even the most marginal individuals polyglot, multicultural bodies. My previous work explored the war testimonies of Indian soldiers during the two World Wars. My current work is an investigation of communities of migrant Indian labourers across the Pacific and their connection to revolutionary movements at home and abroad.
Professor Cathy Turner
My research principally concerns dramaturgies of place and space, including walking art, site-based performance and the relationship of performance to the city.
I am currently working with Dr Evelyn O’Malley (PI) and Prof Tim Coles (Business School) on a Covid-19 rapid response grant (AHRC), ‘Outside the Box: Open Air Performance as Pandemic Response’. I am also jointly editing a book on performance and South Indian cities, following a network grant on the politics of performance festivals in South India, and the ways in which they respond to urbanization.
Dr Dominic Vendell
I am a historian of South Asia. My main research concerns law, diplomacy, and sociocultural exchange in the eighteenth-century Maratha empire with particular attention to forms and practices of documentation.
Dr Rebecca Williams
My research interests are in the history of medicine in modern South Asia, particularly the politics of health and development in post-independence India. My PhD research addressed the establishment of population control programmes in 1950s India, examining the role of the Indian state and of transnational organisations.
Professor Amina Yaqin
Associate Professor in World Literatures and Publishing (E&R)
Past and Visiting Members
Dr Elizabeth Thelen
I am a social and legal historian of pre-colonial South Asia. My research to date has focused on early modern religious institutions and urban society in pilgrimage towns in Rajasthan. At Exeter, I am part of the ERC-funded Forms of Law in the Early Modern Persianate World project led by Prof. Nandini Chatterjee and am researching the intersection of Persian and Rajasthani-language legal documents.
Ghulam Dastgeer Khan
Exchange student Quaid-i Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan