South Asian Dance Studies Working Group (Exploratory Working Group)

Chair: Anusha Kedhar, [email protected]

This working group gathers scholars who research South Asian dance (broadly conceived) from different geographic regions, disciplinary approaches, and artistic lenses to share research, offer mentorship, and engage in productive dialogue about current issues and debates in the field. We are especially interested in addressing questions of in/equity, including caste, class, region, genre, and nation. This working group seeks to complement the work of the Asian and Asian Diaspora Dance Studies Working Group by focusing on the distinct questions and challenges in the South Asian dance field. We will hold an in person or hybrid working group meeting at the Annual Conference and meet online at least once a year outside the conference.

Image Credit: Dancing villagers (detail), approx. 1730. Attributed to Pandit Seu (Indian, 1680–1740). Los Angeles County Museum of Art, from the Nasli and Alice Heeramaneck Collection

Anusha Kedhar, Exploratory Working Group Co-Chair

Anusha Kedhar is an Associate Professor of Critical Dance Studies at the University of California Riverside. Her teaching interests include dance in India and the diaspora, caste and performance, global political economy, and dance ethnography.  She is the author of the award-winning book Flexible Bodies: British South Asian Dancers in an Age of Neoliberalism (2020) and a co-investigator on the UK-funded research project South Asian Dance Equity: The Arts British South Asian Dance Ignores. She is also the convener of the Caste and Corporeality conference and a founding member of the University of California Collective for Caste Abolition. Her writings have been published in Dance Research Journal, Race and Yoga, The Feminist Wire, The New York Times, and the Oxford Handbook of Indian Dance, among others. Anusha is also an established dance artist. She is trained in bharatanatyam and has toured extensively in the UK and Europe with various contemporary Indian dance companies and dance artists. Her solo choreography has been presented in Los Angeles, Malta, Colorado, and New York.