Kamala Visweswaran

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

A cultural anthropologist by training, Kamala Visweswaran is interdisciplinary in her work. Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (University of Minnesota Press, 1994), Visweswaran’s first book, explored the intersections of ethnography and literature. The relationship of anthropology to history underlies her forthcoming book, “Family Subjects: Women, Feminism, Indian Nationalism,” which re-conceptualizes women’s roles in the twentieth-century Indian nationalist movement through an ethnographic analysis of historical narrative.

During her Radcliffe fellowship year, Visweswaran will explore how the identification of women with community has gendered the subject of law, thereby influencing the formulation of women’s rights in colonial and postcolonial India. The project, based primarily on archival research, will undertake a historical analysis of changes in marriage practices in late-nineteenth-century India in an effort to understand how “nuptial acts” both transgressed the limits of law and generated a legacy of legal reform for modern India.

An associate professor of anthropology and Asian studies at the University of Texas at Austin, Visweswaran earned her PhD at Stanford University. Her awards include two Fulbright fellowships to India and a Sawyer Seminar Mellon fellowship at the University of Chicago.