Dr. Ramya Sreenivasan

Biography

Ramya Sreenivasan is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania. She specializes in the history of society, politics, and culture in second-millennium South Asia, particularly focusing on northern India from the thirteenth century to the present. Her research interests involve examining long-term change and continuity in institutions, communities, and cultural practices. She authored the book 'Lives of Rajput Queens: Heroic Pasts in India, 1500–1950', which investigates the origins of the legendary queen of northwestern India and the narratives surrounding her memory, especially as it has been appropriated by majoritarian ethno-nationalists in late twentieth-century India. This work led her to explore various versions of the story told across different regions and languages over five centuries, ultimately revealing how historical memory forms and preserves particular aspects of the past. Currently, she is writing a book on the early modern polities of northern India during the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries, focusing on how new technologies like gunpowder and paper altered the extractive capacities of elites and created new political forms. Additionally, she has published work on topics such as household history, kinship, and slavery in early modern South Asia and is gathering materials for a book on mass culture in mid-twentieth-century India.

Research Interests