About
“Prof. Lakshmi Arya Thathachar is Dean- Research and Professor in the School of Law, RV University. In her capacity as Dean-Research, she also chairs the Office of Doctoral Studies. Lakshmi is a historian by training: She earned a PhD in Modern Indian History from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her research and teaching is interdisciplinary and spans History and Philosophy. Her areas of interest are the socio-cultural history of colonial India, epistemology, and political philosophy.
She has previously held faculty positions at various institutions including O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat; AURO University, Surat; and the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore. She has been awarded several prestigious fellowships, including a Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, a Charles Wallace Fellowship, and a Fellowship of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. Lakshmi also writes creatively. Her poems and short stories have appeared in literary journals. “
- in R. Krishnaswamy and Atreyee Majumder (Eds.), Liberalism and its Encounters in India: Some Interdisciplinary Approaches, London: Routledge, 2023.
- The Hindu, March 21, 2022
- in Ashleigh Barnes (ed.), Feminisms of Discontent: Global Contestations, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015.
- in CUSP: Critical Cultures and Cultural Critiques in Psychology, Vol. 1, No. 2. New Delhi, 2017.
- in Jindal Global Law Review 5 (1), Special Issue on Law, Culture and Queer Sexualities, Sonipat: Jindal Global University, 2012.
- in Davina Cooper, Didi Herman, Emily Grabham and Jane Krishnadas (eds.), Theorising Intersectionality and Beyond: Social Inequality, Justice and the Politics of Subjectivity, London: Routledge and Cavendish, 2008.
- in Feminist Legal Studies (2006) 14/ 3: 293 — 328.
- forthcoming in Anway Mukhopadhay and Saptarshi Mallick (Eds.) Philosophers in Fiction Across Cultures, Bloomsbury.
Freedom, Self and Truth: The 'Liberty' in Liberalism
Two Freedoms and the Hijab in our Midst
Normativity, Power and Politics: Some Questions for Indian Feminism/s
Sasha and the Secret Gift
Anjali Arondekar’s For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India
Imagining Alternative Universalisms: Intersectionality and the Limits of Liberal Discourse
The Uniform Civil Code: The Politics of the Universal in Postcolonial India
Widows, Prostitutes and Freedom: Philosophy in Unusual Places
Prof. Lakshmi Arya Thathachar is currently working on an inter-disciplinary research project in which she proposes and develops the idea of an intellectual tradition. She develops a comparative perspective into the problematization of the questions of truth and freedom in two intellectual traditions: the modern, 'secular' Western tradition of political philosophy, which, she demonstrates, has Christian theological roots, and the intellectual traditions of India. Her project has salience for a host of contemporary socio-political and legal issues, in which the question of freedom is debated.
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Residency at the International Writers’ and Translators’ House, Ventspils, Latvia (2023)
The residency is sponsored by the State Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia.
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Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research Fellowship.
As a Fulbright Fellow, she was affiliated to the School of Law, Emory University, Atlanta.
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Fellowship of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IIAS), Shimla.
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The Charles Wallace Trust's Postdoctoral Fellowship
School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.
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Gender, Sexuality and Law Visiting Fellowship,
School of Law, Keele University, U.K.
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Junior Research Fellow of the Indian Council of Historical Research (I.C.H.R.), New Delhi.
The Junior Research Fellowship of the I.C.H.R. is a grant awarded to students pursuing doctoral research in historical studies.
Dean- Research and Professor, School Of Law
Ph.D. (Modern Indian History), Jawaharlal Nehru University