Sumathi Ramaswamy

I am a cultural historian of South Asia and the British Empire and my research over the last few years has been largely in the areas of visual studies, the history of cartography, and gender. My recent publications in this area include The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India (Duke University Press, 2010); and four edited volumes, Barefoot Across the Nation: Maqbool Fida Husain and the Idea of India (Routledge, 2010),  Empires of Vision (co-edited with Martin Jay, Duke University Press, 2014), Motherland: Pushpamala N.'s Woman and Nation  (co-edited with Monica Juneja, 2022), and Photographing Civil Disobedience: Bombay 1930-1931 (with Avrati Bhatnagar, 2025). My pictorial monograph titled Husain's Raj: Visions of Empire and Nation was published in 2016 by Marg, Mumbai. My work in popular visual history also led me in 2006 to co-establish Tasveerghar: A Digital Network of South Asian Popular Visual Culture.   For a number of years, I also worked on a project on Gandhi and visual culture funded by the Humboldt Foundation which honored me in 2016 with the Annaliese Maier Research Award. In the sphere of public visual humanities, I published two works in 2020: Gandhi in the Gallery:The Art of Disobdience, and a digital project titled B is for Bapu: Gandhi in the Art of the Child in Modern India.  More recently, I have been involved in a project titled "Disobedient Subjects: Bombay, 1930-1931," about which you can learn more here.

I am also pursuing a research agenda on the cultures of learning in colonial and postcolonial India. As part of this agenda, I published a monograph titled Terrestrial Lessons: The Conquest of the World as Globe (University of Chicago Press, 2017), in which I explore the debates in colonial India about the shape and disposition of the earth in the universe and examine the course of science education conducted around the terrestrial globe as a pedagogic object as it enters Indian schools. 

A second project on Indian philanthropy and higher education draws upon my experience as Program Officer for Education, Arts & Culture for the Ford Foundation in New Delhi (2002-2005). It charts the ethical, economic and political impulses that have governed private philanthropy directed towards the establishment of colleges and universities across British India from the early 19th century into the 1950s.

Since 2018, I have had the honor to serve as the elected President of the American Institute of Indian Studies, completing my second term in June 2026.