Rumya S. Putcha

Rumya S. Putcha is an associate professor in the Institute for Women's and Gender Studies and in the Hugh Hodgson School of Music. Her research interests center on colonial and anti-colonial thought, particularly around constructs of knowledge, the body, and the state. Her first book, The Dancer’s Voice: Performance and Womanhood in Transnational India (Duke University Press, 2023), develops a transnational feminist approach to Indian performance cultures. Her second book project, “Ecologies of Yoga: Somatic Orientalism and Imaginations of India,” extends her work on transnational performance cultures to critical histories of science and medicine. 

Education

A.B., The University of Chicago

A.M., The University of Chicago

Ph.D., The University of Chicago

Selected recent publications:

“from elsewhere,” Feminist Review (2023) 133: 1-10.

“#yeeyeenation: Country boys and the Mythopoetics of White Public Culture,” DuBois Review: Social Science Research on Race (2022), 1-16

“The Mythical Courtesan: Womanhood and Dance in Transnational India,” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism (2021) 20(1): 127-150.

“Yoga and White Public Space” Religions (2020) 11: 1-14.

“The Modern Courtesan: Gender, Religion, and Dance in Transnational India,” Feminist Review (2020) 126: 54-73.

"After Eat, Pray, Love: Tourism, Orientalism, and Cartographies of Salvation,” Tourist Studies (2020) 20(4): 1-17    

“Gender, Caste, and Feminist Praxis in Transnational South India” The Journal of South Asian Popular Culture (2019) 17(1): 61-79

“Dancing in Place: Mythopoetics and the Production of History in Kuchipudi” Yearbook for Traditional Music (2015) 47: 1-26

“Between History and Historiography: The Origins of Classical Kuchipudi Dance.” Dance Research Journal (2013) 45(3): 1-20

Photo credit: Jason Thrasher