SOAN welcomes new ANTH professor, Rashmi Sadana

Professor Rashmi Sadana received her Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley in 2003. Before coming to GMU, she was Visiting Assistant Professor in Sociology at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi and at IIT Chennai. Professor Sadana’s field research focuses on changing forms of identity (class, caste, gender, religious, linguistic, etc.) in postcolonial, urban India. She is especially interested in how Indians express their modern and increasingly global selves, and the cultural and political ramifications of doing so. For example, her first book, English Heart, Hindi Heartland: the Political Life of Literature in India (University of California Press, 2012), examines the changing and sometimes conflicted relationship Indians have to language (especially Hindi and English) through an ethnographic study of publishers, writers, translators, booksellers and others involved in producing literature in India and for a global literary market. Her newest project is about the globalization of India’s cities with a focus on notions of the public and public spaces, and the politics of urban design and development as witnessed in the construction of Delhi’s new metro system. She is co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Modern Indian Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2012.)