My MPhil project explores politico-military violence from partitioning India (1939-47) in contemporary Kashmir and the different ways this registers in South Asian narratives. I will be focussing on novels by Arundhati Roy and Bhisham Sahni, tracing how violence manifests as temporality and the effects of ‘necessary forgetfulness.’ I will interrogate different nationalist discourses, violent policies and intellectual practices in the subcontinent, to explore a way of understanding partition history and identity in relation to temporality and how that shapes contemporary South Asia. I completed my undergraduate degree in English at Queen Mary University of London.

As a Cambridge Trust and George Kingsley Roth scholar, Julia is working on a dissertation delineating the environmental history of salt production in Bengal, with a particular focus on the Sundarbans. Her project asks how commodity production and the labor it required shaped Bengal’s littoral landscape during the long nineteenth century. Julia completed her AB at Harvard University in 2019, where she majored in History & Literature and received a language citation in Hindi and Urdu.

In terms of my MPhil research interests, I am generally interested in studying developments in subcontinental Buddhism during British colonial rule with a view to understanding how these developments affected attitudes and relations between India and Ceylon. Through this research, I hope to uncover whether the basis existed for a "Greater India" involving India and Ceylon through the activities of Buddhist practice, revivalism, scholarship, and travel.

I am a graduate of Queen Mary, University of London, interested in the recent history and changing ideologies of Hindu nationalism in India. My MPhil thesis explores the ways in which populist Hindutva discourses over the last half-century have provided instruction for mass communal violence. Alongside research into the writings of Hindutva ideologues and popular contemporary media, I examine textual evidence within case studies of contemporary RSS activism, probing the relationship between the agency of the individual kar sevak and public spectacles of violence, and better conceptualising what it means to be participants in, as well as consumers of, history.