Sandria B. Freitag

SANDRIA B. FREITAG has long explored a range of source materials that can be used to answer new questions about non-elites in British Indian society (working on riots as windows into communal identity-formation; constructions of criminality; and visual culture for its revelations about popular values and motivations at work in public sphere activities).  Publications include Community and Collective Action:  Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism… and the collection of essays, Culture and Power in Banaras, as well as numerous essays on crime and – the current project – on the emergence of photography and poster art as the first two “mass media” produced in British India  These include, for instance, “South Asian Ways of Seeing; Muslim Ways of Knowing:  The Indian Muslim niche market in posters” in Indian Economic and Social History Review, 44:3 (2007):297-331; and “More Than Meets the (Hindu) Eye:  The Public Sphere as a Space for Alternative Visions” essay for Richard Davis (ed), Picturing the Nation… (Orient Longman, 2007), 92-116.  She teaches visual culture and modern South Asian history in the History Department of North Carolina State University.