the curators

Avrati Bhatnagar is an incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Iowa. Previously, she was Instructor in History and International Comparative Studies at Duke University. Her interdisciplinary research combines the study of image-based and textual archives to explore the political cultures of South Asia. She has published in History of Photography and co-edited Photographing Civil Disobedience: Bombay, 1930–31, published by the Alkazi Collection of Photography in association with Mapin Publishing (2025), a volume of essays that draws on a rare collection of historical photographs from the Civil Disobedience movement (1930-31) in Bombay/Mumbai. Currently, Avrati is working on her first book-project titled, Disobedient Women in a Consumer City: Picturing Swadeshi Culture in Colonial Bombay, which offers a gender history of colonial Bombay, examining how middle-class women's everyday urban practices drove nationalist politics during the Civil Disobedience Movement, even as the freedoms they claimed exceeded the nationalist agenda itself. Learn more about her research here. 

Sumathi Ramaswamy is James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of History at Duke University. She has published on language politics, gender studies, spatial studies and the history of cartography, visual studies and the modern history of art, and more recently, digital humanities and the history of philanthropy in modern India. Her most recent works are Gandhi in the Gallery: The Art of Disobedience (New Delhi: Roli Books, 2020), a digital project on children’s art titled B is for Bapu: Gandhi in the Art of the Child in Modern India (2020), and a co-edited volume (with Monica Juneja) titled Motherland: Pushpamala N.’s Woman and Nation (New Delhi: Roli Books, 2022). She is also a co-founder of Tasveerghar: A Digital Network of South Asian Popular Visual Culture (2006- ). Her research has been supported among others by the Social Science Research Council, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the US Fulbright Commission, and the American Institute of Indian Studies. She is currently working on a new project on educational philanthropy in British India.