Isha Dubey


Assistant Professor
Ph.D (Aarhus University, Denmark)
Research Areas: Memory studies; History of modern and contemporary South Asia; Partition studies; Bangladesh studies; histories of migration; urban history
Email: isha.dubey@iiit.ac.in

I joined the Human Sciences Research Centre at IIIT Hyderabad as a faculty member in history in December 2022.I graduated with a PhD from the School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University, Denmark in October 2017 after completing my MA and BA degrees from Jawaharlal Nehru University and the University of Delhi respectively. Prior to joining IIIT, I have worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Swedish South Asian Studies Network (SASNET) at Lund University, Sweden and the Department of Global Studies, Aarhus University. The temporal and regional focus of my research is modern and contemporary South Asia, and my work is guided by an overarching interest in Partition and Bangladesh studies, memory studies, diaspora studies, histories of migration, nationalism and communalism and urban history.

Select Publications

  • [Article] Dubey, Isha. “Remembering, Forgetting and Memorialising: 1947, 1971 and the state of memory studies in South Asia.” India Review 20, no. 5 (2021): 510-539.
  • [Article] Dubey, Isha. “Muhajir Narratives of Homes Lost and Found: Nostalgia and belonging in the novels of Intizar Husain and the columns of The Daily Pasban.” Journal of Migration Affairs IV, no. 1 (2021): 54-76.
  • [Article] Dubey, Isha. “Between ‘Everyday’ and ‘Extraordinary’: Partition, violence and the communal riots of 1946 in Bihar.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 30, no. 2(2020): 283-312.
  • [Article] Dubey, Isha. “Navigating the Insider/Outsider Divide: Muhajirs in East Pakistan through the columns of The Daily Pasban,” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 78, (2017): 878-885. (awarded the Partha Sarathi Gupta Memorial Prize and the S.C. Jha Memorial Prize)

Projects

  • Constructing the Oceans: Indian Ocean Infrastructures and Thick Transregionalism (CO-OC)

    I am a co-investigator in the Danish Research Council Funded project Constructing the Oceans (CO-OC) – jointly hosted by the departments of Global Studies, Anthropology and Study of Religion at Aarhus University. Applying Engseng Ho’s methodological framework of ‘thick transregionalism’, the project aims to study the social life of infrastructures of a widely dispersed yet cohesive religious community – the Dawoodi Bohras – through simultaneous, multi-sited ethnographies in three littoral locations in the Indian Ocean – Dubai (UAE), Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) and Mumbai (India). Within this larger thematic purview of the CO-OC project, I examine the dynamics of the entanglements between the ‘social’ and the ‘material’ dimensions of Mumbai’s Bhendi Bazaar. More specifically, I focus on the ways in which the Shia Dawoodi Bohras - its most populous and prominent community - inhabit and interact with these two dimensions of the locality both historically and in the present as it goes through a colossal dissembling/re-assembling in the form of a community-led urban redevelopment project.

Research Students

  • Maharnav Singhal

Research Supervision Interests

  • Migration and displacement in South Asia
  • Memory politics
  • Histories of conflict and reconciliation
  • Communalism and communal violence
  • Nationalism and identity politics in South Asia
  • Social change and social memory in urban India