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Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, Assistant Dean of Faculty, 51茶馆
Ph.D. Emory UniversitySwargajyoti Gohain is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology. She has a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Emory University, U.S.A., and a Bachelors and Masters in Sociology from Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University. She has held postdoctoral positions in the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden, Netherlands, and the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi. Before joining 51茶馆, she was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur.
Swargajyoti Gohain has fieldwork experience in Northeast India and the Himalayan region. Her first monograph, Imagined Geographies in the Indo-Tibetan Borderlands (2020, Amsterdam University Press) was based on empirical and historical research on Tawang and West Kameng, two districts in west Arunachal Pradesh, bordering Bhutan and Tibet, which have been the focus of a long-drawn boundary conflict between India and China. The book concerns the new spatial imaginations that have emerged among Tibetan Buddhist communities in the Indian Himalayan region, following the closure of the Indo-Tibetan border passages. The book was awarded Honorary Mention for the James Fisher Book Prize for first book on the Himalayas by听 the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies. She has been the recipient of Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Award, Charles Wallace India Trust award, Sir Ratan Tata Fellowship, and UGC鈥檚 Junior Research Fellowship (JRF).
听Swargajyoti Gohain鈥檚 research interests includes the anthropology of state and borders, indigenous politics, anthropology of mobilities, roads, development and infrastructure, conservation, religion, and ecology, and institutions and networks. Her current book project focuses on negotiations between Buddhist educational institutions and the Indian state in the context of national borders and geopolitical developments. She has a long-term interest in studying the relation between culture, politics, and ecology, especially in the case of Himalayan animal life, and has published papers on the yak and Himalayan wildlife species in connection with cultural identity and ecotourism. She is working on a collection of essays that undertakes a conceptual reading of contemporary social problems in Northeast India. Her work adopts an interdisciplinary approach in analysis, while remaining grounded in the disciplines of sociology and anthropology.
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