Claremont McKenna College Emerita Professor Nita Kumar has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a highly competitive grant that invests in scholars, artists, scientists, writers, and cultural visionaries.
With her Guggenheim Fellowship, Kumar plans to research and write a social history of an urban upper middle class Kayastha family from 1911 to 2016 covering much of Uttar Pradesh. She will look at gender hierarchies, theorize change in 20th-century India, and present a contextualized discussion of the historian’s craft.
“The research will focus on the history of a woman known as Suniti and her upper middle class family at several levels, reflecting on how the story is impacted by the state of official and family archives, Indian notions of time and history, discourses of gender, caste and class,” said Kumar. “Over five generations, the members of Suniti’s family occupied the ranks of landowners, administrators, writers, judges, and advocates.”
Chosen through a rigorous application and peer review process from a pool of almost 3,000 applicants, the Class of 2024 Guggenheim Fellows was selected on the basis of prior career achievement. A number of the Fellows’ projects directly respond to issues of today such as democracy and politics, identity, disability activism, machine learning, incarceration, climate change, and community. Each fellow receives a monetary stipend to pursue independent work.
“I am honored to be one of this year’s Guggenheim Fellowship recipients,” said Kumar. “Throughout my career in writing and teaching, I have been interested in issues of how history is interpreted and written, and similarly as an anthropologist, I have focused on methodological issues. This grant is a culmination of my professional work to date and I look forward to delving deeper into the story of Suniti and her family.”