Dr Natasa Thoudam
Nominated Fellow, May 2025
Home institution: Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur
Natasa Thoudam is an Assistant Professor of English in the School of Liberal Arts (SoLA) at the Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur. Her highly transdisciplinary research on Manipur in India’s Northeast intersects Comics Studies, Digital Humanities, Gender Studies, Literary Studies, Performance Studies, and Religious Studies. She is also working on two book projects: one on Religious Studies and the other on Comics Studies.
Project title: How to Set up a “Postcolonial Digital Archive” in India: My Journey from Jodhpur to Edinburgh and Back
The project examines the cases of two existing repatriation projects on India's Northeast region (Manipur) associated with UK archives (both museums and libraries) and the attempts on the part of these archives to decolonise their exhibitions/collections. It raises questions that pertain not only to access but also selection of artefacts for collection, preservation, and exhibition in these archives, thus revealing the exclusionary practices associated with the UK “colonial archives” that house confiscated collections from the region. This project also attempts to read these two repatriation projects through the lens of gender.