Asia

Asian elephants have been an integral part of social life in India for centuries – as war elephants, participants in temple rituals, heavy laborers, and recently in conservation discourse.

My project considers the way Ainu people, the Indigenous people of northern Japan, express identity and think about what being Indigenous means within their communities.

This project explores whether Chinese investment in Gwadar Port in Pakistan, located at the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz, a critical lifeline in global trade, can contribute to a significant reordering of Central Asian trade flows in the backdrop of the war in Ukraine.

This study explores the relationship between Britain’s abolition of slavery in its Caribbean colonies (1838) and its instigation of the First Opium War with China (1839).

The book project, “Capitals in the Margins: South Asia Since Partition” seeks to answer why, despite the shared experience of colonial British rule and a shared investment in anticolonial nationalist movements, South Asia remains the least integrated region in the world.

How did British colonial efforts to expand “commodity frontiers” come to shape environmental changes on one hand and contestations over belonging, citizenship and territory on the other in South Asia?

I plan to do a historical analysis of the convict labor used by the British East India Company in the early nineteenth century in their newly acquired territory in the North Western Provinces of British India.

I study the interaction of state capacity and an underexplored religious institution – religious cults that center around one figure of authority.

Benefitting from interdisciplinary methodologies of spatial analysis and digital history, my research tries to rediscover its history by questioning the economic, social, and cultural impacts of the slave trade on the Ottoman Imperial Capital.

What can Gandhian ideas offer to a world caught in ever-expanding environmental crises?