Rumya S. Putcha is an associate professor in the Institute for Women's and Gender Studies and in the Hugh Hodgson School of Music. Her research interests center on colonial and anti-colonial thought, particularly around constructs of knowledge, the body, and the state. Her first book, The Dancer’s Voice: Performance and Womanhood in Transnational India (Duke University Press, 2023), develops a transnational feminist approach to Indian performance cultures. Her second book project, “Ecologies of Yoga: Somatic Orientalism and Imaginations of India,” extends her work on transnational performance cultures to critical histories of science and medicine.
Education
A.B., The University of Chicago
M.A., The University of Chicago
Ph.D., The University of Chicago
Selected recent publications:
“from elsewhere,” Feminist Review (2023) 133: 1-10.
“Yoga and White Public Space” Religions (2020) 11: 1-14.
Photo credit: Jason Thrasher
Music Areas and Ensembles
Her research interests center on post-Enlightenment, colonial, and postcolonial thought, particularly around constructs of citizenship, race, gender, sexuality, the body, and the law. Professor Putcha received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2011 and her first book, Mythical Courtesan | Modern Wife: Feminist Praxis in Transnational South Asia, develops a decolonial feminist approach to South Asian performance cultures. She is currently working on a project titled, “Refrains of a Hillbilly Elegy: Country Boys, Social Media, and the Affective Politics of 21st Century White Supremacy,” which examines expressions of race, citizenship, and post-9/11 American cultural politics within country music publics. Her second book project, “Namaste Nation: Commercial Yoga Industries and U.S. Imperialism” extends her work on South Asian performance cultures to critical analyses of capitalist yoga practices within legal and affective discourses of body, race, wellness, and citizenship.
