S. Ani Mukherji earned his Ph.D. in American Studies at Brown University. His intellectual interests center on questions of culture, politics, and America’s place in the world in the twentieth century. More specifically, his research examines the ways in which race, migration, and empire have impacted US and global histories, engaging larger historiographical and theoretical debates on the nature of colonialism, nationalism, and international order. His dissertation, “The Anticolonial Imagination: The Exilic Productions of American Anticolonialism in Interwar Moscow, 1919-1939,” analyzed the political and cultural expressions of a small group of diasporic anticolonialists who traveled to Moscow to work and to study in institutions administered by the Communist International (Comintern). His current projects include: revising his dissertation manuscript for publication; translating a Russian-language manuscript by Japanese American socialist Katayama Sen; completing a study of the Calcutta-born Eurasian writer Cedric Dover (tentatively entitled “A Eurasian Disciple of the Harlem Renaissance”); and drafting a short essay on the interesting confluence of Gandhian ideas, radical pacifism, and queer sexualities in mid-century America (looking at writers and activists such as Paul Goodman, Barbara Deming, and Bayard Rustin). Ani is very happy to have been awarded a postdoctoral fellowship so he might actually get a few of these projects done.
