Ketaki Pant

• Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, Migration and Displacement in Early Modern and Modern Asia, Brown University, 2016 – 2018
• ASIANetwork-Luce Postdoctoral Teaching Fellowship, Bucknell University, 2015-2016

Summary Statement of Research Interests

I am a historian of South Asia, the Indian Ocean region, and the Himalayas (eighteenth century to the present day) focused on interlinked histories of capitalism, colonialism, migration, diaspora, and minoritization as well as on the archives these processes produce across the global South.

Research Keywords

Indian Ocean, South Asia, capitalism, feminist studies, colonial studies, anthropology, visual history, global South, minoritization

Detailed Statement of Research Interests

Focused on South Asia, the Indian Ocean, and the Himalayan borderlands, my research projects track transformed experiences of belonging, community and home, crucial domains impacted by transregional circulations of capital and labor during an era of competing empires and colonial occupation.

My first set of research projects are anchored in the pivotal coastline of western India (Gujarat) that historically connected British imperial economic networks across the Indian Ocean, linking Africa and Asia, key to histories of circulation across multiple regions. Publications from this research include a book and several essays, discussed below.

My book Itinerant Belonging: Intimate Histories of Indian Ocean Capitalism (Cambridge, April 2025) utilizes old merchant homes (havelis) in coastal Gujarat linked to port cities across the Indian Ocean as lenses with which to view the entanglements of oceanic capitalism with religion, race, gender, and family. Employing concepts from colonial studies, feminist studies, and history, I argue that old homes, their occupants, and community imaginations housed in local archives provide a rich epistemology for understanding colonial capitalism in the Indian Ocean as a spatial project that produced both belonging and unbelonging.

Representative publications from this research agenda have also appeared in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies and The Routledge Handbook on Asian Transnationalism. A new essay on feminist methodologies for studying histories of capitalism across the Indian Ocean is forthcoming in Feminist Studies.

My new research is on visual history, early modern empire, and exploration in the Himalayas. To pursue research for this project, I was awarded an USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute Faculty Fellowship in Spring 2025.

I am also working on a new research agenda on decolonization, caste, and anti-colonial nationalism in oceanic Gujarat.