Stanford University
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Sharika Thiranagama
Associate Professor of Anthropology
BioSharika Thiranagama's work has consistently explored how political mobilization and domestic life intersect, focusing on highly fraught contexts of violence, inequality, and intense political mobilization. This work and broader comparative theorization rests on understanding how people actually live together, often in highly fractious and unequal ways, situating these processes in specific historical formations of vernacular “privates” and “publics” in South Asia.
Her work is based in Sri Lanka and in Kerala, South India. In Sri Lanka, her primary research (In My Mother’s House: Civil War in Sri Lanka 2011) was on civil war, political violence, home, displacement, militarization, family particularly intergenerational and gendered relations in wartime and post war life. This work takes these themes through the lives of Sri Lankan Tamil and Sri Lankan Muslim minorities. Other work includes the history of railways, the BBC world service, masculinity, leadership and popular militancy, etc.
Her work in Kerala focuses on the long-lasting legacy on enslavement and caste in the lives on contemporary agricultural Dalit laboring families, examining caste, gender, household economies, house and neighborhood spaces through their inheritance and future affordances. Articles examine the house, public and private in India, inheritance as inequality, and caste and neighborliness.
Her future work will take an examination of inheritance, caste and family back to Sri Lanka for new fieldwork in Jaffna with Tamils and Muslims after Sri Lanka’s recent economic collapse and postwar caste conflicts. -
Mudit Trivedi
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
BioMudit Trivedi is an archaeologist with interests in religious subjectivity, materiality, craft and historical anthropology.
His first book project, An Archaeology of Virtue, considers the archaeology of conversion to Islam through the results of an ongoing long-term archaeological project he has co-directed at the site of Indor in Rajasthan, North India. This research bridges archaeological and anthropological conceptualizations of tradition. It considers the thematizations of ethical relations, hierarchies and gendered pious praxis in material media. It brings together analyses of architectural, spatial and artifactual datasets combined with compositional elemental analyses. The project’s wider goals are to rethink the secular modern commitments of archaeology and the nature of the archaeological trace.
Mudit is also interested in developing critiques of archaeology’s disciplinary commitments to liberal values and legal infrastructures. A first paper from this project critically re-situates colonial Treasure Trove laws that framed the archaeological common good around the taking of finds from others. This second project reconsiders archaeological praxis and the discipline’s recourse to property law in a series of South Asian contexts ranging from accidental finds to disputes centred on waqfs.
His forthcoming publications relate to these combined interests. They cover archaeometric insights into social contexts of glass artifact production and use in South Asian and other contexts; the long-term settlement history of the region of Mewat in North India, and theoretical problems in the historical and archaeological study of religion and conversion. He has co-edited a special issue of the Medieval History Journal on ‘Archaeologies of the Medieval in South Asia’. -
Barbara L. Voss
Professor of Anthropology
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI am a historical archaeologist who studies the dynamics and outcomes of transnational cultural encounters: How did diverse groups of people, who previously had little knowledge of each other, navigate the challenges and opportunities of abrupt and sustained interactions caused by colonialism, conflict, and migration? I approach this question through fine-grained, site-specific investigations coupled with broad-scale comparative and collaborative research programs.
