Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs
Center for Contemporary South Asia

Rijuta Mehta

PhD Recipient in Modern Culture and Media
Summer Fellow 2014

rijuta_mehta@brown.edu

Research Interests: South Asian feminism, South Asian television, the history of photography, visual culture, and postcolonial theory. She has a Ph.D in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University, as well as a B.A. in English from the University of Delhi. 

In summer 2014, Rijuta worked on her Partition Photography Project with funding from CCSA.  The Partion Photography Project is a digital humanities project that puts together an archive of photographs of everyday life from the mid- to late-1940s in the Indian subcontinent. It collects and digitizes family albums, found/orphan photos, and vernacular images from these formative years before and after the Partition Plan to understand how areas of national conflict were produced. It tracks the character of regional life-making practices under sovereign friend/enemy relations between the new states of India and Pakistan through the medium of photography and its special relation to the every day.