People
Mellon Sawyer Seminar Postdoctoral Fellows
Nidhi Mahajan

Nidhi Mahajan received her PhD in Anthropology from Cornell University. Her book
project entitled Moorings: Indian Ocean Trade and the State in East Africa is an
historical ethnography that examines interactions between participants of
transregional trade networks and multiple regulatory regimes in coastal Kenya
and the Western Indian Ocean. Ever since 9/11, the Kenyan coast has become a
flashpoint for national and international security. Governments assume that the
predominantly Muslim merchants and sailors of the coast, with longstanding
commercial and social ties across the Indian Ocean are entwined with militant
groups. She suggests that these conflicts have emerged from a deep-rooted
anxiety over the long history of trade and connection across the Indian Ocean as
these networks challenge state sovereignty. From 19th-century encounters between
sailors and anti-slavery British naval patrols, to ivory smuggling in the 1970s;
from contemporary Kenyan state regulation of trade at Mombasa's Old Port, to
everyday life on board an Indian sailing vessel in East Africa, she examines how
mobile participants in Indian Ocean trade have responded to state control —
whether imperial, colonial, or national — by operating in the interstices of the
legal and illegal. Her research traces the everyday workings of these
transregional trade networks and the quotidian practices of statecraft,
demonstrating how notions of sovereignty and belonging are negotiated "on the
ground" through these encounters.
Mark Minch

Mark Minch is an enrolled member of the Susanville Indian Rancheria in Northern
California. He received his Ph.D. in Rhetoric with a designated emphasis in
Women, Gender, and Sexuality from UC Berkeley in 2014, and held a Mellon
postdoctoral fellowship in Native American Studies at Wesleyan University for
the past two years. His current book project, Native Revitalizations:
Transcriptions and Gestures of Cultural Return, explores cultural revitalization
efforts undertaken by indigenous communities as sites of important political,
cultural, and philosophical junctures, particularly as these efforts invest in
and become invested with a certain notion of cultural life. Focusing primarily
on projects currently taking place in Native California, it looks at the risks
attending the desire to live and practice of living again in the aftermath of a
genocidal campaign, a spatial and temporal frame that some have labeled in
California as being post-apocalyptic. Within such a largely invisible disaster,
it asks how variously individualized and humanized bodies can ethically be
reconnected to the neglected and shameful detritus of settler colonial knowledge
production without falling into the traps of (1) modernizing and consumptive
heritage and (2) an organicist and reactionary model of revitalization that
lends itself to organization and hierarchization, risking cooptation by the
state in the form of biocultural management. Following the writers of the
disaster, the project offers instead an inorganic and gestural notion of culture
as soft prescription, one that opens up to other spaces and possibilities of
sovereignty.
Tufts Sawyer Seminar Postdoctoral Fellows
Anna C. Cruz

Khury Petersen-Smith
