Professor Sumathi Ramaswamy

Professor Sumathi Ramaswamy is Professor of History at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Prior to this appointment, she was Professor of History at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. She studied for her MA and M.Phil. in ancient Indian history at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She also has a Master’s in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania, and graduated with a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891–1970 (University of California Press, 1997) and The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories (University of California Press, 2004). She has also edited a volume entitled Beyond Appearances? Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern India (Sage, 2003), and has recently completed a book manuscript entitled The Goddess and the Nation: Picturing Mother India that is part of a larger project on empire, nationalism, and cartographic culture.