Sneha Roychoudhury studies questions of nation-state and performance, the sacrality of state and the imaginations of sacred geography in India’s borderlands, particularly the Himalayas. After completing her undergraduate studies in History, she worked as a legislative researcher to Members of Parliament in India. She also has a Master’s degree in History from Ambedkar University, Delhi. Her interests bring together her training as a professional and academic researcher located within the centers of power of the Indian state to look at processes of historical consciousness and state-making in India. For her doctoral project she is working on space-making and meaning-making in the Indian Himalayan borderland through the specificity of museum-shrines in the region. Sneha delves into the dialogic and synchronic relationships between story-telling, art and iconographies and terrain, manufactured notions of remoteness and tourism in the region. This project emerges from her wider interests in memory-making, orality and cultures of remembering and forgetting through space and place making in South Asia.

Sneha also works closely with peers who wish to apply to the Asian Studies Department at the University of British Columbia and is open to queries about the department, the application process and her own research within the department. She is currently a Doctoral Writing Consultant at the Centre for Writing and Scholarly Communications at UBC and believes in a deeply collaborative academic practice.