reserach
My research takes up linguistic recognition as a historiographical, affective, and political tool, especially of displaced subjects and exiles. Working between the worlds of Seleucid-Mauryan encounters in the Hellenistic period and British-Indian encounters in colonial modernity, I work on literatures that conscript and fabulate a shared ancient homeland between Greek and Indic communities. In a second gesture, I examine how the resonances of these encounters issue themselves anew in postcolonial discourses on the Indian state, its citizenry, and borders, scoping out a radical potentiality at the underbelly of Indo-European Studies. Ultimately, my work aspires to demonstrate how exiles, from antiquity to modernity, have retooled the idea of a proto-language and universal history towards the proliferation of new homelands troubling dispossessive, nationalist, ethno-statist projects.
Responsive to the speculative and counterfactual dimensions of this research that exceed the generic boundaries of the dissertation as an artifact, under the auspices of my IHUM fellowship, I am producing a “speculative bibliography”. Reading and writing between the poetry and fictions of Etel Adnan, Roberto Bolaño, and Jorge Luis Borges, I attempt to account for what cannot be cited, what cannot be historicized, what cannot be real in my archives through a narrative practice that holds my interest in phantom and imagined worlds of contact.
Propagated from these studies, I also teach, research, and write on the university as a site that “civilizes” political culture and the exchange between forms of capital and forms of disciplinarity.
education
Ph. D (ABD) // Princeton University // Classics and Humanistic Studies
M.A. (2025) // Princeton University // Classics
B.A. (2021) // Barnard College // Greek and Sanskrit
fields of study
Hellenistic History // Philology // Postcolonial Literature and Subaltern Studies // Indo-European Studies // Speculative History // Critical University Studies // Exile and Genocide Studies
selected conferences, workshops, and presentations
2026 // “Arab Apocalypse: Death Before Death in the Classical Maghreb,” // Society for Classical Studies Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA.
2025 // “Anticipating an Antigone in Gaza,” for In Solidarity with Palestine: A Roundtable II // Critical Ancient World Studies and Everyday Orientalism.
2024 // “South Asian Scholars and the Palestinian Question –Solidarities, Affinities and Connections,” // The Annual Conference on South Asia, Madison, WI.
2024 // “Disclose & Divest: How to?” with Davarian Baldwin and Robin D.G. Kelley // Marguerite Casey Foundation’s Summer School: Building A People and Planet-Centered Future.
2024 // “Spectral Cartographies: Haunting and the Ancient Mediterranean,” // workshop organized with Paul Eberwine, Princeton, NJ.
2024 // “‘In the Presence of Absence’: On Classics and Palestine,” with Katherine Blouin // Res. Diff. 5
2022 // “‘The Indians Counted 153 Kings’: Iterations Towards (the Dream of) India’s De-Fragmented Classical Corpus” // Annual South Asia Graduate Conference, Princeton, NJ.
2022 // “The Middled East: Meditations & Mediations at Border of Megasthenes’ Indica” // UPenn’s Center for Ancient Studies Annual Graduate Conference, Philadelphia, PA.
teaching record
Spring 2026 // Teaching Assistant // Ancient Greek: An Intensive Introduction (CLG 103)
Fall 2025 // Co-instructor // Histories and Theories of the Academic Humanities (HUM 330)**
Spring 2025 // Co-instructor // Power and the Professoriate (HUM 331)**
Fall 2024 // Co-instructor // Histories and Theories of the Academic Humanities (HUM 330)**
Fall 2024 // Teaching Assistant // Magic and Witchcraft in the Ancient World (CLA 234)
** co-created syllabus and curriculum for the class
Aditi Ra 