Publications

July 15, 2021

Anna Bigelow

Islam through Objects represents the state of the field of Islamic material cultural studies. With contributions from scholars of religion, anthropologists, art historians, folklorists, historians, and other disciplines, Anna Bigelow brings together a wide range of perspectives on Islamic materiality to debunk myths of Islamic aversion to material aspects of religion. (Bloomsbury Publishing)

October 20, 2020

Priya Satia

For generations, British thinkers told the history of an empire whose story was still very much in the making. While they wrote of conquest, imperial rule in India, the Middle East, Africa, and the Caribbean was consolidated. While they described the development of imperial governance, rebellions were brutally crushed. As they reimagined empire during the two world wars, decolonization was compromised. Priya Satia shows how these historians not only interpreted the major political events of their time but also shaped the future that followed. (Harvard University Press)

October 16, 2020

Usha Iyer

Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema, an ambitious study of two of South Asia's most popular cultural forms — cinema and dance — historicizes and theorizes the material and cultural production of film dance, a staple attraction of popular Hindi cinema. It explores how the dynamic figurations of the body wrought by cinematic dance forms from the 1930s to the 1990s produce unique constructions of gender, sexuality, stardom, and spectacle. (Oxford University Press)