Assistant Professor

Dr. Swathi Shivanand is a historian. She received her PhD from the Centre for Historical Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her doctoral thesis explored ideas of region-making and development through a study of twentieth-century history of Hyderabad-Karnataka, located in northeast Karnataka. As a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Minnesota, she was involved in mapping the history of rental economy in Bengaluru. As a research consultant at the Alternative Law Forum, she headed a research project on charting a history of the garment industry through unionisation and life-histories of garment workers in Bengaluru as well as documenting the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on workers. Her M.Phil thesis, undertaken at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, studied the urban history of post-independence Delhi through the trajectory of an under-explored institution called the Delhi Urban Art Commission. Dr. Shivanand has several years of experience in research and has previously worked with the Alternative Law Forum, Indian Institute of Human Settlements, Centre for Policy Research and The Hindu. Her areas of interest include urban and regional histories, particularly through the prisms of development, labour and gender. She is also interested in the political economy of news media, particularly regional language media. Her publications have appeared in journals such as Urbanisation and Economic and Political Weekly and in popular publications such as The Wire, Scroll, and Newsminute.

Department of Liberal Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (DLHS) Bengaluru