Rumya S. Putcha is an Associate Professor in the Institute for Women’s and Gender Studies and 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), offers a transnational feminist account of Indian performance cultures. The book has received multiple international awards, including the de la Torre Bueno® First Book Award from the Dance Studies Association and the Bernard S. Cohn First Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies, along with additional recognitions from the American Society for Theatre Research and the Society for Ethnomusicology. An Indian edition of the book was published in 2026.

Her current book project, Ecologies of Yoga: Somatic Orientalism and Imaginations of India, examines how encounters between European observers and South Asian ascetic practitioners transformed sensory knowledge into imperial authority, bringing performance studies into conversation with critical histories of science and medicine.

She serves as Associate Editor of American Anthropologist and on the editorial boards of several scholarly journals. 

Education

A.B., The University of Chicago

A.M., The University of Chicago

Ph.D., The University of Chicago

Selected recent publications:

“Gender, Caste, and South Asian Performance in the Decolonial Turn.” Sociology Compass (2025): e70078. https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.70078.

“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