Divya Cherian headshot
Current Member

Divya Cherian

Affiliation

Historical Studies

Field of study

Early Modern and Nineteenth-Century South Asian History

Home institution

Princeton University
Divya Cherian is a historian of pre- and early colonial India/South Asia interested in histories of embodied difference. Her first book examined shifts in articulations of caste, untouchability, and Hindu-ness in eighteenth-century, pre-colonial South Asia. While at the Institute, she will be writing a history of witch persecution and primitivity in the transition from early modernity to colonial modernity in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century South Asia.

Visits

Member
School of Historical Studies

Degrees

Columbia University, New York City
Ph.D.
2015
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
M.A./M.Phil.
2008
Delhi University, Delhi
B.A.
2004

Honors

2025-26
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (terminated)
2024
John F. Richards Prize, American Historical Association
2022
Joseph W. Elder Prize, American Institute of Indian Studies

Appointments

Princeton University
2023
Associate Professor
Princeton University
2016–2023
Assistant Professor
Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, Rutgers University, New Brunswick
2015–2016
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow