Arie M. Dubnov is a Senior Lecturer at the School of History and the Department of General History at the University of Haifa, Israel. Dubnov earned his Ph.D. at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and was a George L. Mosse Fellow at the University of Wisconsin–‐Madison, and served for four years as an Acting Assistant Professor at Stanford University’s Department of History. Dubnov’s fields of expertise are modern Jewish and European intellectual history, with a subsidiary interest in nationalism studies and British imperial history. He is the author of the intellectual biography Isaiah Berlin: The Journey of a Jewish Liberal (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), and he also edited the collection [in Hebrew] Zionism – A View from the Outside (The Bialik Institute, 2010), seeking to put Zionist history in a larger comparative trajectory. For more information, visit his website.
Dubnov’s current research project deals with the genealogy of the idea of partition in the British interwar Imperial context. The talk presented herewith is based on a chapter he is preparing for a collection of essays under his editorship, entitled Partitions: Towards Transnational History of Twentieth Century Territorial Separatism.
Rajmohan Gandhi is a historian and biographer, and is the grandson of the Mahatma Gandhi. He served until the end of 2012 as Research Professor at the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Academic Director of the Global Crossroads Living and Learning Community at the University of Illinois.
A former member of the Rajya Sabha (the upper house of the Indian Parliament), Gandhi led the Indian delegation to the UN Human Rights Commission in 1990. In 2009 he was elected President for two years of Initiatives of Change International, an NGO working for trust and reconciliation. Professor Gandhi is the author of many books on South Asian History, the most recent of which are: Gandhi: The Man, His People, and the Empire (2006), winner of the prestigious Biennial Award from the Indian History Congress in 2007; A Tale of Two Revolts: India’s Mutiny and the American Civil War (2011); Punjab: A History from Aurangzeb to Mountbatten (2013); Prince of Gujarat: The Extraordinary Story of Prince Gopaldas Desai, 1887-1951 (2014); and Understanding the Founding Fathers: An Inquiry into the Indian Republic’s Beginnings (2016).
Pranav Jani is a scholar, writer, organizer and social justice activist in Columbus, Ohio. He teaches English at Ohio State University, specializing in Postcolonial Studies and US Ethnic Studies. His first book, Decentering Rushdie: Cosmopolitanism and the Indian English Novel in English (2010), discusses the
relationship between history and literature in post-independence India. His current research project, on the 1857 Revolt and the legacy of anticolonial struggle in colonized South Asia, looks at changing narratives of the uprising in the Indian imagination over the course of more than 150 years.
Pranav has also published articles and reviews in collections and journals like Marxism, Modernist and Postcolonial Studies, Globalizing Dissent: Essays on Arundhati Roy, Tracing the New Indian Diaspora, Postcolonial Studies, Critical Sociology, Historical Materialism, and International Socialist Review.”
Brian Kelly is an award-winning historian whose research has focused on race and labor in the nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries. He is past director of the After Slavery Project and the author a number of books and articles, including the Deutscher Prize-winning Race, Class and Power in the Alabama Coalfields, 1908-1921 (2001). He is a co-organizer of the Belfast Working-Class History Group/Cumann Stáire Lucht Oibre mBeal Feirste and the author of Neoliberal Belfast. Pranav has also published articles and reviews in collections and journals like Marxism, Modernist and Postcolonial Studies, Globalizing Dissent: Essays on Arundhati Roy, Tracing the New Indian Diaspora, Postcolonial Studies, Critical Sociology, Historical Materialism, and International Socialist Review.
Aparna Kumar is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she specializes in modern and contemporary South Asian art and architecture. In her time at UCLA, her research interests have grown to include Mughal art and architecture, partition history, post-colonial theory and criticism, museum studies and South Asian cinema, while her work has remained deeply interested in the intersection of art, language and political science in South Asia. Kumar’s dissertation project, tentatively titled ‘Partition and the Historiography of Art in South Asia,’ explores the impact of partition on the development of art, art institutions and aesthetic discourse in India and Pakistan in the 1940s and 1950s. It uses cross-border case studies to reconsider the history of modernist painting, museums and archaeology in South Asia, and to ask: what might the visual arts be able to uniquely contribute to the process of writing Partition history in the present and the formation of a more nuanced understanding of Partition and its continuing ramifications? In 2015-2016, Kumar was the recipient of the American Institute of Indian Studies Junior Research fellowship, and the Fulbright-Nehru Student Research fellowship. Her recent publications include ‘Unsettling the National: My East is Your West, Venice Biennale, and After Midnight, Queens Museum,’ in Museum Worlds: Advances in Research (2015).
Feargal Mac Ionnrachtaigh is a product of Irish Medium Education in West Belfast. He attended Queens University Belfast and completed his PhD thesis in 2009, subsequently published as Language, Resistance and Revival: Republican Prisoners and the Irish Language in the North of Ireland (Pluto, 2013), now in its second edition. He has published numerous articles and delivered papers at conferences throughout Europe on multidisciplinary research interests such as sociolinguistics, transitional justice, Irish studies and Irish historiography, culture and identity politics, and critical criminology. A prominent member of the Feachtas Dearg campaign, he works as Community Project Officer with Gaeltacht Quarter Irish Language development Agency, Forbairt Feirste, and is chairperson of Upper Springfield Irish Language organisation, Glór na Móna. He is a Post-Doctoral Researcher in the Institute for Collaborative Research in the Humanities at Queens University Belfast and appears regularly as a commentator on radio and television.
Debali Mookerjea-Leonard
Dr. Mookerjea-Leonard holds a Ph.D. in South Asian Studies from the University of Chicago and is currently Associate Professor of English and World Literature and coordinator of the World Literature Minor at James Madison University, Virginia. Her teaching and research interests include World Literature, South Asian Literature and Film, Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures, Postcolonial Theory, Women’s Literature, Feminist Theory and Gender Studies, and Literature of the Partition of India.
Dr. Mookerjea-Leonard is a winner of numerous awards, including: Feminist Scholarship Award, Women’s Studies Program, James Madison University;
National Endowment for the Humanities / American Institute of Indian Studies
Senior Fellowship; Summer Research Grant, College of Arts and Letters, James Madison University; and Edna T. Shaeffer Humanist Award, James Madison University.
Publications include the book, Indian Partition in Literature and Film: History, Politics, Aesthetics, co-edited with Rini Bhattacharya Mehta, and refereed journal articles and chapters in books: “The Unmaking of Citizenship: Nasreen’s Lajja and the Minority Man in Postcolonial South Asia.” Social Text 108 (Fall 2011), “To be pure, or not to be: Gandhi, Women and the Partition.” Feminist Review 94 (2010), “The Diminished Man: Partition and ‘Transcendental Homelessness’” in Partitioned Lives: Narratives of Home, Displacement and Re-settlement. Anjali Gera Roy and Nandi Bhatia (Eds.). Pearson Education, India, 2008.
Deepti Misri
Dr. Deepti Misri is Associate Professor in the Department of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado – Boulder. She joined the CU faculty in fall 2008, after completing her PhD in English and a graduate minor in gender and women’s studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her areas of interest span South Asian literary and cultural production, transnational feminist studies, feminist theory and criticism, and postcolonial studies. She is the author of Beyond Partition Gender, Violence, and Representation in Postcolonial India, published by the University of Illinois Press.
Ibrahim Natil is a visiting scholar at School of Politics and International relations, University College Dublin. He holds his Ph.D. in politics and history from Coventry University. Dr. Natil is an international development consultant and worked for many international NGOs. He is the founder of the Society Voice Foundation in Palestine. He has launched and managed various range of human rights, women’s empowerment and peacebuilding programmes and projects since 1997. He presented papers at conferences throughout Europe and published several articles and book chapters on a wide range of topics including NGOs, refugees, youth, women empowerment, youth and Arab spring, HAMAS, The Gaza Strip, Turkey and comparative politics of nationalism between Northern Ireland and Palestine. He also writes and contributes to Independent Australia. He presented many conference papers and authored several articles and book chapters on a wide range of topics. He is the book author: Hamas Transformation Opportunities and Challenges, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015.
Penny Sinanoglou is Assistant Professor of History at Wake Forest College in Winston-Salem North Carolina. She received her Ph.D. in History from Harvard University, and her B.A. in History and Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University. Dr. Sinanoglou has published on twentieth-century British policy-making in the Middle East, and works more broadly on questions of empire, nationalism, ethnic identity, and decolonization. Her recent publications include “The Peel Commission and Partition, 1936-1938,” in Britain, Palestine and Empire: The Mandate Years, Rory Miller, ed. (Ashgate, 2010), 119-140, and “British Plans for the Partition of Palestine, 1929-1938,” The Historical Journal 52 (2009): 131–52.