Prof. Dr. Sumathi Ramaswamy
Sumathi Ramaswamy is James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of History and Professor of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University. Her earliest area of research was language, gender and nationalism in Tamil India. From the late 1990s, she moved into the field of spatial studies. Her subsequent research has focused primarily on visual studies, the history of cartography, and gender. Ramaswamy has also pursued a second strand of research on the cultures of learning and educational philanthropy in modern India. Between 2002 and 2005, she served as Program Officer for Education, Arts, and Culture at the Ford Foundation in New Delhi.
As part of her fellowship at CEMES, Ramaswamy will explore how the charisma of sainthood and the aura of asceticism materialized in the everyday Gandhian practices of asking for and receiving money that both underwrote the Mahatma’s conspicuously austere lifestyle and financed a vast anticolonial movement directed against the British Empire. Building on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of capital, she demonstrates how the Mahatma’s messianic politics transmuted symbolic capital into economic resources through a practice of giving that givers perceived as salvational. Her project directly advances the mission of CEMES by demonstrating how the conversion of symbolic capital into messianic fund-raising can mobilize resources to drive monumental movements for national liberation.
