Dr Tarangini Sriraman
Staff details
Tarangini's research interests lie at the intersection of social and medical history across the 19th and 20th centuries.
Dr. Tarangini Sriraman is currently engaged as a Wellcome Trust funded Research Fellow. She is working on a book project that looks at how caste and gender structure medical discourses on alcohol, and how various dissenting publics are formed around alcohol regulation in colonial and postcolonial South India.
Academic qualifications
- PhD, University of Delhi, India 2014
Research interests
Tarangini's research interests are molded by the courses she has taught in the past on theories of cultural and intellectual modernity, medical humanities, and feminism and politics in India. She is also interested in histories from the margins, transforming urban discourses in South Asia, migration studies, and the anthropology of the state.
Her recently published book "In Pursuit of Proof: A History of Identification Documents in India" weaves together a hitherto unattempted history of making and verifying identification documents in the urban margins of India, and Delhi in particular. She has also written about regimes of proof that bind migrant workers and relief figures during the COVID lockdowns in India.
Tarangini has published in various international and Indian journals such as South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, Indian Economic and Social History Review, Economic and Political Weekly and Contributions to Indian Sociology. She has also published articles for leading national newspapers and sites in India such as The Wire, The Newsminute, The New Indian Express, and The Print.
Featured publications
Grants and awards
2022: Wellcome Early Career Research Fellowship in the Humanities and Social Sciences
2019: Charles Wallace Short Term Research Grant
2017: South Asian Program Visiting Fellowship, Cornell University
Publications and research outputs
Article
Sriraman, Tarangini. 2023. The power of the ‘universal’: caste and missionary medical discourses of alcoholism in the Telugu print sphere, 1900–1940. Medical History, 67(4), pp. 324-346. ISSN 0025-7273
Sriraman, Tarangini. 2023. Shifting Temperance Landscapes: Locating Caste and Gender within the Spatial Politics of Drink in the Madras Presidency. Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, 37(1), pp. 125-156. ISSN 1930-8418
Sriraman, Tarangini. 2022. Affective Activism and Digital Archiving: Relief Work and Migrant Workers during the Covid-19 Lockdown in India. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 45(2), pp. 224-239. ISSN 1081-6976
Professional projects
Volunteer work for the Stranded Workers Action Network, in 2020 and 2021, a network organised to help migrant workers who were in need of relief during the COVID pandemic.