Dr. Isha Dubey has joined the Department of Global Studies as a postdoctoral researcher on the Constructing the Ocean (CO-OC) project from February 2022. Within the broad framework of the CO-OC project, Dr. Dubey will be focusing on one of its primary littoral locations in the Indian Ocean – Mumbai. More specifically, she will examine and unpack the dynamics of the entanglements between the ‘social’ and the ‘material’ dimensions of the city’s historic Bhendi Bazaar area. Using the methods of ethnography, oral history, and archival research her sub-project seeks to understand the ways in which the locality’s Muslim inhabitants and more specifically its most populous community - the Dawoodi Bohras - engage with questions of heritage and infrastructure, tradition and modernity, collective memory and collective imagination against the backdrop of Bhendi Bazar’s massive ongoing community-led urban-redevelopment project. The regional focus of her research is South Asia with an overarching interest in histories of migration, nationalism, communalism and communal violence, diaspora studies, memory studies and urban history.

Dr. Dubey graduated with a PhD in history from the School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University in 2017 and was employed at the Swedish South Asian Studies Network (SASNET), Lund University as a postdoctoral fellow and researcher prior to joining this current position.