
Dr Mallika Leuzinger - orcid.org/0000-0002-0599-3123
Digital Postdoctoral Fellow, June 2022 - November 2022
Home Institution: Princeton University
Mallika Leuzinger studied History and Gender Studies at Cambridge University and completed her PhD in Art History at University College London. She has since been a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University and the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, and a visiting researcher at Humboldt University in Berlin, where she is part of the Department of Gender and Media Studies for the South Asian Region.
Mallika is interested in postcolonial modernity, gender, everyday technologies and archives. Her doctoral thesis attends to the spaces and relations of "domestic" photography, examining the practices of Haleema Hashim, a Kutchi Memon woman in the south Indian port city of Cochin, and the peripatetic Bengali twin sisters Manobina Roy and Debalina Majumdar, as well as how their work has been retrieved and reconfigured over the past decades. It also considers the ongoing mobilization of the camera as a tool for women's empowerment in the Global South by NGOs, artists and academics. She is currently revising this work for the monograph Dwelling in Photography: Intimacy, Amateurism and the Camera in South Asia and beginning a new project on digital archives and the politics of crowdsourcing history.
Project Title: Archival Imaginaries and the Politics of History in South Asia
This project looks at the rise of digital crowdsourced platforms dealing in histories of the Indian subcontinent. It asks how, why and for whom these platforms constitute 'archives'. It examines the affective, material, visual and geopolitical registers they deploy and conjure, situating them in relation to institutional and/or stubbornly analogue collections; activist media projects; and popular history initiatives in Africa and the Middle East.