Professor Geeta Patel

Visiting Research Fellow
Prof. Geeta Patel

Professor Geeta Patel

Visiting Research Fellow, February - May 2022

Home Institution: University of Virginia

I am a Professor at the University of Virginia, with three degrees in science and a doctorate from Columbia University, NY in inter-disciplinary South Asian Studies. I have published in both academic and popular venues on the conundrums posed by bringing gender, nation/state, sexuality, finance, science, media, capital, and aesthetics together, and translated lyric and prose from Sanskrit, Urdu, Hindi, and Braj. My writing in every genre is composed for the voice. Lyrical Movements, Historical Hauntings: On Gender, Colonialism and Desire in Miraji’s Urdu Poetry, writes the history of South Asian literary modernism through its Kashmir-Urdu lyric-harbinger Miraji. Peopled by histories of sexuality, aesthetics and political movements, colonial education policies, the monograph takes on literary imaginaries ravaged by colonialism. Risky Bodies & Techno-Intimacy: Reflections on Sexuality, Media, Science, Finance uses techno-intimacy as the locus for interrogating capital, science, media, and desire. Here I tune into science in unexpected ways in order to investigate political economy, nationalism, sexuality, financialization, cinema. I co-edited three special issues that engage with several of my areas of expertise. “In Queery/In Theory/ In Deed” and “Area Impossible,” for GLQ and “Trust and Islamic Capital” for Society and Business Review (the outcome of long-duration grants in the UK addressing Islamophobia). I am working on several other projects: a manuscript on the Muslim woman writer Ismat Chughtai using the history of scientific realism, light, quantum and special relativity as vectors; a manuscript on fantasies embedded in advertising called “Billboard Fantasies.” My current research is on the ways in which the history of bacteriology and our relationship to our own bacterial life produces our everyday sense of nationalism as genocidal colonialists in our own bodies. I recently began composing my own lyric under the lockdown in India, which augments the bio-fiction short pieces I have been publishing since the 1990s.

My courses range from interdisciplinary methodologies starting with field biology and physics and turning to finance, political economy, aesthetics, architecture, political geography, history, anthropology to popular culture in South Asia. Bollywood; History of trade, finance and traffic in Oceanic South Asia; Poetry, art, music; Sexuality and cinema; History of science.

In a symbiotic interchange with my academic pursuits are my public engagements. From one of the first battered women’s shelters, to prison HIV-AIDs activism, workshops on race, gender, sexuality, class, to radical institutional change from kindergarten to graduate schools, tribal colleges and inner city schools in the US, working with labor unions, to developing alternate pedagogies that reformat the classroom and community engagement, to curating art and film festivals, engaging with queer-trans performance by communities and adolescents of color, to working with farmers and health practitioners, to fiscal support projects, these have been folded into and have underwritten my research.

Project Title: A Poor Person's History of Colonial Pensions

I am completing research for and writing a series of small books on historical pensions, insurance, credit and debt. The first is on what may arguably be the first private public pension fund—the Madras Civil Fund which was started in the late 1700s and whose articulation brought Mughal and European notions of financial compensation together. This book will rewrite the commonly understood history of pensions and the welfare state – relocating it from Europe to India and backdating it by about 100 years. It will also rescript the history of capital.