Ranu Roychoudhuri comes to the ISM from the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, India, where she is assistant professor of humanities and social sciences. She is a historian of photography and art with interests in South Asian studies, postcolonial theory, popular visual culture, and the intellectual history of art. During her fellowship year, she will work on a project entitled Theology, Politics, and Art: Documentary Photographs from Post-Emergency Calcutta, which will analyze layered conversations between documentary photography and Christian social thought in postcolonial India by looking into institutional histories as well as the material and intellectual histories of those photographs.
Eben Graves holds a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from the University of Texas at Austin and has held fellowships at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and Columbia University. He currently directs the ISM Fellows program and oversees various research initiatives and events at the ISM. His research on devotional song in South Asia has appeared in the journals Ethnomusicology and the Journal of Hindu Studies, among other publications, and his current research focuses on connections between musical performance, devotional practice, and social time in contemporary West Bengal.
This conversation is part of a series of talks with ISM faculty and fellows done via Zoom while working from home in spring 2020.
