Return to Richa Nagar's Homepage
BRIEF BACKGROUND
I was born and raised in the lanes of Chowk in the old city of Lucknow in India, in a lower-middle class extended family of storytellers, theater workers, house-wives and grade school-teachers. I grew up breathing and living a blend of working- and middle class Muslim and Hindu cultures, and became the first person in my family to learn English in an elite Protestant school of European origin, La Martiniere Girls' School. While the stark contrasts between my school environment and my neighborhood streets made me acutely aware of class, caste and social location, my home environment instilled in me a passion for popular forms of music, dance, drama and poetry. I began to publish short stories, poems, children's plays and journalistic reviews in Hindustani in 1982, and it was around the same time that my geography teacher, Ms. McClure, convinced me that the only way to combine everything I felt passionately about in my life was by becoming a geographer! Shortly thereafter, with my father's encouragement, I began voluntary work with journalists and theater activists and received my first lessons in ethnography and oral history. And it was the women activists at Awadh College in Lucknow and at the University of Poona, whose voices against dowry, rape, communalism, and casteism sowed the seeds of feminism inside me. From there, I traveled to Minnesota in 1989 to seek a doctoral degree in Geography -- an intense intellectual, political and personal journey that took me to Tanzania to study race and communal politics from a feminist perspective. Upon completion of my Ph.D., I taught for two years at the Geography Department in Boulder (Colorado), before returning in 1997 to my new interdisciplinary home in Women's Studies at Minnesota.
For a short story of my intellectual journey, click here
EDUCATION
RECENT AWARDS AND FELLOWSHIPS