PhD student Neha Kohli was just named as a recipient of the 2023 Rothman Doctoral Fellowship from the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere.
Neha received the fellowship for her project The Matter of Islands: Examining Island Narratives and Political Life in the Eastern Indian Ocean.
This project examines how claims to territory in the Indian Ocean are supported by diverse political possibilities of physical landscapes and narratives about islands. Specifically, it studies the case of India and the Nicobar Islands. The ways in which territory is constructed and negotiated by the state and Indigenous communities is less explored in scholarship on India’s Island geographies. Through historical and anthropological methods, this project addresses this gap by studying territorial processes as historical, racial, and material processes. Drawing on political ecology, the study advances a novel theoretical framework to study island contexts, especially in South Asia.