Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Kultur-, Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften

Bionote

Mallika Leuzinger is a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University, having studied History and Gender Studies at Cambridge University and Art History at UCL. She is interested in postcolonial modernity, gender, everyday technologies and archives. Her doctoral thesis attends to the spaces and relations of "domestic" photography, examining the practices of Haleema Hashim, a Kutchi Memon woman in the south Indian port city of Cochin, and the peripatetic Bengali twin sisters Manobina Roy and Debalina Majumdar, as well as how their work has been retrieved and reconfigured over the past decades. It also considers the ongoing mobilization of the camera as a tool for women's empowerment in the Global South by NGOs, artists and academics. Since completing her PhD in 2020, she has been working on the monograph Dwelling in Photography: Intimacy, Amateurism and the Camera in South Asia and a new project on digital archives and the politics of crowdsourcing history. 

Research project

Archival Imaginaries and the Politics of History in South Asia

This project looks at the rise of digital crowdsourced platforms dealing in histories of the Indian subcontinent. It asks how, why and for whom these platforms constitute 'archives'. It examines the affective, material, visual and geopolitical registers they deploy and conjure, situating them in relation to institutional and/or stubbornly analogue collections; activist media projects; and popular history initiatives in Africa and the Middle East.