Rama Sundari Mantena

RAMA SUNDARI MANTENA

Assistant Professor of History

Professor Mantena teaches courses relating to British colonialism in India, Indian nationalism, and women and gender in Indian history. Her first book The Origins of Modern Historiography in India (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) examines everyday practices surrounding acts of collecting, surveying, and antiquarianism in the early period of British colonial rule in India. By examining early imperial strategies of producing historical knowledge, the book traces the colonial conditions of the production of “sources,” the forging of a new historical method, and the ascendance of positivist historiography in nineteenth-century India. She has begun work on a new book project entitled “Vernacular Publics and Political Modernity in Colonial South India, 1860-1956,” which explores the emergence of Telugu (a south Indian language spoken in present-day Andhra Pradesh) publics in the latter decades of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. An article based on this research, “Vernacular Publics and Political Modernity: Language and Progress in Colonial South India,” is forthcoming in Modern Asian Studies.