Assistant Professor in Global Studies

I obtained my PhD in anthropology from the London School of Economics (LSE): my work analyses the history and present of the flows of ideas, people and goods which inform society and culture in South Asia. Where I hold a global approach to the major transformations currently affecting this region, my intellectual background is itself global as it draws on the experience of a number of academic contexts, on the unique insights into cross-cultural perspectives I gained through my long-term research in India, and, since the onset of my career, on my active role in knowledge exchange and dissemination.

My expertise draws from three and a half years of fieldwork carried out in north India with Dalit (ex-untouchable) communities. A significant body of publications has emerged from this research (including books and several peer-reviewed articles in leading journals): my publications focus on modernity, agency, education, labor ethnohistory, gender, youth, class, and gender and politics.

Moreover, my interests in the above issues are intertwined with wider intellectual concerns on the dynamics and the politics of transnational knowledge production, epistemology, categories and representation, and research methodologies.

Current Research Projects

1) Following the award of a ‘Framing the global’ fellowship (2011-2014) by Indiana University Bloomington (http://www.indiana.edu/~global/framing/fellows.php), I have started a new project entitled:

'Modern and contemporary Indian art and the global:

Culture, capital, and the development of post-colonial taste'

Project overview:

Largely purchased by Indian buyers at home and in diaspora, modern and contemporary Indian art is a success story in globalising the particular through the creation of market value. In the process, art engenders new class distinctions, fosters artistic taste and ultimately, re-brands India. This project explores such success story through an ethnographic investigation targeting galleries, auction houses, fairs, buyers and artists operating at several geocultural nodal points. Central to this network is its relation with art objects, the paths of these objects’ virtual and physical circulation, and the features of ‘Indianness’ which make them valuable locally and globally. To this end, the project traces the translation processes - backward and forward - between the local and the global which objects undergo across space(s) and culture(s). The project also assesses the potential, the limits and/or the inevitability of such processes as well as Indian art objects’ and their informing canons’ translatability into ‘universals’.

2) Following the award of an International Network Grant by the Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation (http://www.fi.dk/tilskud/bevillingsoversigter/2012/midlerne-fra-det-internationale-netvaerksprogram-i-2011/?searchterm=ciotti), I have started a project which brings together scholars from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Shanghai University, and Chung-Ang University, Seul. This project is entitled:

'India and China: Art worlds and markets in globalising Asia'

 Selected publications (Full list under the publications section)

2013. Forthcoming. Political agency and gender in India. Women, Dalits and subalterns between the nation and its ‘others’. London, New York: Routledge (under contract)

2012. Forthcoming. M. Ciotti (ed.) Femininities and masculinities in Indian politics. Essays on gender archetypes, leadership and activism. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books (under contract)

2012. Forthcoming. 'Uttar Pradesh: Untouchability and politics' In The modern anthropology of India. A Reader, Peter Berger & Frank Heidemann (eds.), London, New York: Routledge

2012. Forthcoming. Dalits and Indian modernity. Struggling for dignity, 9^th Ambedkar Memorial Lecture, Manchester Metropolitan University

2012. Forthcoming. 'Post-colonial renaissance: ‘Indianness’, contemporary art and the market in the age of neoliberal capital', Third World Quarterly

2012. 'Resurrecting seva (social service): Dalit and low-caste women party activists as producers and consumers of political culture and practice in urban north India', The Journal of Asian Studies 71, 1

2011. 'After subversion: Intimate encounters, the agency in and of representation, and the unfinished project of gender without sexuality in India’, Cultural Dynamics, 23: 2, 107-126

2011. ‘Remaking traditional sociality, ephemeral friendships and enduring political alliances: 'State-made' Dalit youth in rural northern Indian society’, Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, 59: 19-32

2010. Retro-modern India. Forging the low-caste self. New Delhi, London: Routledge

2010. ‘The bourgeois woman and the half-naked one’: Or the Indian nation's contradictions personified', Modern Asian Studies 4: 785–815

2010. ‘Futurity in words: Low-caste women politicians’ self-representation and post-Dalit scenarios in north India’ Contemporary South Asia, 18, 1: 43–56

2009. 'The conditions of politics: Low-caste women and political agency in a northern Indian city', Feminist Review, 91: 113-134

2008. 'Islam: What is in a name?' In M. Banerjee (ed.) Muslim portraits. Everyday lives in India. New Delhi: Yoda Press/Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, pp. 1-10

2007. ‘Ethnohistories behind local and global bazaars: Chronicle of a Chamar weaving community and its disappearance in the Banaras region’, Contributions to Indian Sociology (n.s.) 41, 3: 319–52

2006. ‘At the margins of feminist politics? Everyday lives of women activists in northern India’, Contemporary South Asia, Vol. 15 (4) 437-452

2006. “In the past we were a bit ‘Chamar’”: Education as a self- and community engineering process in northern India', Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 899-916