Graduate Students
Aiswarya Gangadhar
Psychology
Aiswarya Gangadhar is currently a PhD student in social psychology at UCSC. Her research focuses on the inequitable positions of Indian women in society. Through her work in social psychology she envisions gender equity through systemic and structural change in India. Furthermore, she is working to decolonize psychology by advancing alternate forms of knowledge in psychology that has been hegemonically Western in theory and understanding. She aims to do this by bringing in Majority world (non-Western) perspectives that are rooted in contexts of culture, history and geographies. Previously, she completed her Master’s in Applied Social Psychology in the Netherlands and B.A in Bengaluru.
Balakrishnan Raghavan
Music
Balakrishnan Raghavan is an accomplished musician, researcher, and educator. He is a doctoral student in Cross-Cultural Musicology with a directed emphasis in Feminist Studies. His work focuses on oral traditions of music across the Indian subcontinent, with an emphasis on the politics of spirituality, South Asian performing traditions, caste, gender, and sexuality. He trained for over twenty years in traditional vocal music. With over ten years of interdisciplinary performance experience, he attempts to re-imagine the many ways of looking at traditional music from India, and centre the marginalized experience at the intersection of song, poetry, sexuality, and personal narrative.
Keshav Batish
Music
Keshav Batish is a multi-instrumentalist composer, performer and educator whose work explores Sonic Kinship through dialogue across cultures, with emphasis on Afro-Asian diasporic interrelationships. Trained in Hindustani classical and North Indian folk musics by his father Pt. Ashwin Batish, Keshav has also studied under Creative music luminaries such as Hafez Modirzadeh and Charles Tolliver. T[he]ir debut album “Binaries in Cycle” received critical acclaim, securing a spot on KQED’s “10 Best Bay Area Albums of 2021” list.
Mizan Rahman
Politics
Mizan Rahman is a Ph.D. candidate in Politics. His scholarship sits at the intersection of political theory, intellectual history, and Islamic studies, with a particular focus on the relationship between Islam and liberalism in late colonial and postcolonial South Asia. He is especially interested in recovering historical and political thinking that falls outside of what is often thought to constitute political theory. Rahman’s dissertation project traces the political ideas and actions of four Muslim scholars of twentieth-century Bengal to theorize their thinking around the individual, community, and state.
Radhika Prasad
Literature
Radhika Prasad is a PhD candidate in the Literature department. Her research and teaching are situated in the disciplines of South Asian studies, literature, cultural studies, history, and translation studies, and she is interested in thinking about the relationship between literature, languages, and nationhood. Her dissertation examines the modernist Hindi novel of the post-independence period in India in the context of nationalism and national language politics. It draws on literary theoretical scholarship that examines the mapping of national, cultural, and racial identities upon language, as well as histories of the Hindi public sphere that chart the making of modern Hindi.
Vidula Sonagra
Music
Vidula Sonagra is pursuing a PhD in Cross-Cultural Musicology at the Music Department at UCSC. She has a Master’s and an MPhil degree in Political Science from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She is a writer and translator and has over 5 years experience in working with the Government of Maharashtra in India. She has undertaken inter-disciplinary research on projects related to caste, class and gender both at a theoretical level and action on the ground to create bespoke knowledge products to help understand and evolve solutions for some of India’s most pressing development challenges like the plight of sanitation workers and gender-based violence. Her training and research interests in Music and music instrument makers, led her to pursuing a PhD on the same topic.
Sameem Wani
Literature
Sameem is a PhD student in Literature at UCSC. His work lies at the intersection of World Literature, Comparative Literature, and Globalism. Specifically, he is interested in the interaction between South Asian works of fiction and the global literary marketplace in English. He is also invested in conceptions of aesthetics and politics that arise from such interactions. Outside of academia, he likes reading and writing poems and short stories.
Muhammad Riaz
Politics
Muhammad Riaz is a PhD student in the Politics department. His research engages with urban climate governance and climate change adaptation from non-Western/non-Northern perspectives. He is specifically interested in investigating the intersection of local climate governance and successful climate change adaptation vis-à-vis the institutional, financial, technological and technical under-capacities of sub-national and local governments in developing countries, especially in South Asia, with Pakistan being his primary case study. His research accentuates the disparities and missing link between the theory and practice of contemporary global climate governance paradigms and the existential threat of climate change faced on ground by local communities in these countries.
Malashree Bhargava
Politics
Malashree Bhargava is a PhD student in the Department of Politics with a strong commitment to advancing policy development and capacity building in disaster risk reduction across the Asia-Pacific region. With extensive experience as a policy advisor to the UN and various governments, she has actively contributed to initiatives globally focused on risk-informed development, resilience, and gender inclusion, particularly in South Asian countries – Bangladesh, Nepal, and India. Her research delves into the governance challenges associated with translating international norms and national strategies into actionable solutions at the subnational level. Malashree aims to offer practical recommendations for strengthening local governance, enhancing community resilience, and addressing critical issues at household levels. Through her work, she strives to create impactful changes that foster sustainable development and inclusivity in the regions vulnerable to climate change and disasters.
Akshay Dua
Politics
Akshay Dua is a PhD candidate in the Politics department. His research is centred on political ecology, resource use, parallel governance, and the politics of displacement in South Asia and Latin America, particularly in relation to community-based social movements. Through his studies, he is interested in the use of comparative ethnography as a means of exploring different localized approaches to contesting state power and thereby building radical visions for eco-centric change.
Ankit Sharma
Sociology
Shatakshi Singh
Politics
Shatakshi Singh is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Department of Politics with an interest in the evolving dynamics of legal mobilization in South Asia. Her dissertation examines how marginalized urban populations contest state-enforced evictions and dispossession through the use of law and legal institutions In India. Drawing on interdisciplinary methods, her work contributes to the broader understanding of social justice and rights-based activism in South Asian socio-legal scholarship. Shatakshi holds an M.Phil. and M.A. in International Relations and Area Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University in India, as well as a B.A. in History (Hons.) from the University of Delhi, India. Her work has been supported by the prestigious P.E.O. International Peace Scholarship (2022-2023 and 2023-2024) and the Carrie Chapman Catt Prize for Research on Women and Politics (2023).