MAA News – Inaugural Inclusivity and Diversity Research Grant

We are very pleased to announce that the inaugural Inclusivity & Diversity Research Grant has been awarded to Sourav Ghosh (University of California at Berkeley) to support his project, “Ideology, Infrastructure, and Taxonomy: Archiving and the Origin of Medieval Indian Historiography in Late Colonial India.” In his words, the project “…shows how late colonial aesthetics, archival practices, and ideologies informed and regulated historical research on medieval India. This is both the study of the medieval historiography and the archive that shapes it. By focusing on a private archive (Shree Natnagar Shodh Samsthan: The Raghubir Singh Library and Research Institute) in modern-day central India, I illustrate how infrastructure, material culture, colonial knowledge, collection practices, and categorization undergird and dictate the scholarship on medieval Indian history. Thus, my research on the development of medieval historiography in the modern era complicates our existing understating of medieval studies as a field of inquiry.” In selecting Ghosh, the Prize Committee noted that “This is a strong project on the colonial archive in India that opens up another, little explored, aspect of the uses of the Middle Ages but in a non-Western context. It is both a project of Indian historiography and the influence of global empire. Ghosh has the impressive research and language skills to do this multifaceted research at a focus locale.” More information about this program is available here.