AsPr Meera Ashar

Associate Professor Meera Ashar is a historian of ideas at the School of Culture, History and Language. Her research interests lie at the intersection of history, political theory and literary studies. Her work analyses the ineffectiveness of existing concepts and modes of representation to set the stage for a framework more grounded in the lived experience of the people of South Asia. This research makes critical contributions to history and South Asian studies and to pressing debates on the enduring effects of colonialism, the postcolonial state, democracy and nationalism.

She has published in high quality journals such as Modern Asian Studies, History and Theory, South Asia, and Cultural Dynamics. Her manuscript on the social history of colonial Gujarat examines the region through the lens of a controversial nineteenth-century novel, Saraswatichandra, its author, and its audience.

Until recently she was the Director of the ANU’s South Asia Research Institute (SARI). She has previously worked as an Assistant Professor at the City University of Hong Kong and has been the LM Singhvi Fellow at the Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge. Meera has scripted an award-winning documentary film. She reads and writes in several South Asian languages and in a couple of European ones.