Graduate Students
Aiswarya Gangadhar
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
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
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.
Radhika Prasad
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.