Current Position:
Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in South Asian History (2006-2009), Department of South Asia Studies, University of Pennsylvania.

Research and Teaching Interests: Ram is currently working on his second book project, The Dalit Public Sphere. This new project explores the emergence of an autonomous Dalit movement in northern India by investigating the role of Dalit-controlled mass media and institutional spaces—what I call the Dalit public sphere—in enabling the rise of Dalits within electoral politics in Uttar Pradesh. The existing stereotypes regarding Dalits in India have been made obvious by the inability of journalists, political pundits, and academics alike to explain the unprecedented recent political success of the Dalit Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), and its leader, Mayawati, were featured in The New York Times and The Washington Post (7/18/08). I am currently examining four distinct domains crucial to the formation of this new public sphere: Dalit-owned printing presses established from the 1920s onwards; annual religious and political Dalit melas (fairs), which have brought Dalits from different locations together since 1928; the establishment of Dalit schools and hostels; and the role of Dalit government schoolteachers.

Because of the significant contribution my research has made in helping to constitute the emerging field of Dalit studies within the study of South Asia, the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania invited me organize the first ever Dalit Studies conference in the United States, held in December 3-5, 2008 (http://casi.ssc.upenn.edu/events/2008_CDA.htm). Eleven of our participants came from India, and more than half of the presenters were Dalits, further helping to advance the kind of conversation that, as a non-Dalit scholar, I have worked hard to build.

Reviewer for (a) The Journal of Asian Studies .

(b) Routledge ( London).

Courses and Teaching:

Supervised: Priya Agarwal’s undergraduate History Honors thesis “Forgetting the Violence, Remembering the Report: The Paradox of the 1931 Kanpur Riots.” Her thesis received the History Department’s award for the best thesis in the world history category in 2007-2008 (http://repository.upenn.edu/hist_honors/18/). Priya received four different undergraduate fellowships to undertake an eight-week research trip to India for her research project during the summer between her junior and senior years. I directed Priya to collections at the National Archives of India and the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in Delhi, enabling her to obtain a first-hand archival experience quite unusual at the undergraduate level.

Fall 07:

Spring 2007:

Fall 2006:

Education:

Department of History: University of Delhi.	Thesis entitled, "The Making of the Scheduled Caste Community: A Study of the Scheduled Castes Federation and Dalit Politics in Uttar Pradesh, 1946-48." Gyan Pandey, supervisor.	M.Phil.	1996
Department of History: University of Delhi.	Dissertation entitled, "A Social History of ‘Chamars’ in Uttar Pradesh, 1881-1956." Shahid Amin, supervisor.	Ph.D.	2006

•	"The Making of a Dalit Perspective: The 1940s and the Chamars of Uttar Pradesh", in Festschrift volume for Eleanor Zelliot, edited by Anne Feldhaus and Manu Bhagavan, under review at Routledge, New York.
•	Dalit Perspectives, planned and edited special issue of the prestigious South Asian journal, Seminar, February 2006. The journal has extensive sales and circulation not only in India, but also in the US and Europe. Many professors use special issues of the journal in courses on South Asia. (www.india-seminar.com)
•	"Making Claims for Power: A New Agenda in Dalit Politics of Uttar Pradesh, 1946-48," Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 37, No. 3 (September 2003). (Article revised from chapter one of my M.Phil. thesis.)
•	"Partition Politics and Achhut Identity: A Study of Scheduled Castes Federation and Dalit politics in U.P. 1946-1948," in The Partitions of Memory, Suvir Kaul, ed. (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001, and Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002). This article, also from my M.Phil. thesis, is now being used for MA students in History at Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University. It has also been used in courses at Yale and other U.S. institutions, as well as universities in England and Japan.

Selected Awards:

• Book Prize : The Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences from the American Institute of Indian Studies for my book manuscript, “Untouchable Boundaries of Colonialism and Nationalism: Rethinking Histories of Untouchability in North India,” March 2008.  The book prize carries with it subvention for publication with Indiana University Press in their Contemporary Indian Studies series.
• American Institute of Indian Studies Senior Long Term Fellowship , 2008-2009. Project entitled “The Dalit Public Sphere.”
• Rockefeller Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, Critical Asian Studies, Simpson Center for the Humanities, University of Washington, Seattle, 2004-2005.
• Harry Frank Guggenheim Dissertation Fellowship, September 2003 to August 2004. Project entitled "Overcoming Domination: Struggles of Identity among the Chamars of Uttar Pradesh, 1881-1956."
• SEPHIS Doctoral Fellowship, International Institute of Social History (IISG), Amsterdam, The Netherlands, October 1999-2003. (SEPHIS: South-South Exchange Programme for Research on the History of Development).