Dr. Lakshmi Arya Thathachar

Dean - Research and Professor, School Of Law

lakshmia@rvu.edu.in

About
Publication & Works
Research Summary
Awards & Achievements

“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. “

Widows, Prostitutes and Freedom: Philosophy in Unusual Places

in Anway Mukhopadhyay, Saptarshi Mallick & Debashree Dattaray (Eds.) Finding Philosophers in Global Fiction: Redefining the Philosopher in Multi-cultural Contexts, Bloomsbury, 2024.

Freedom, Self and Truth: The 'Liberty' in Liberalism

in R. Krishnaswamy and Atreyee Majumder (Eds.), Liberalism and its Encounters in India: Some Interdisciplinary Approaches, London: Routledge, 2023.

Two Freedoms and the Hijab in our Midst

The Hindu, March 21, 2022

Normativity, Power and Politics: Some Questions for Indian Feminism/s

in Ashleigh Barnes (Ed.), Feminisms of Discontent: Global Contestations, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Anjali Arondekar’s For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India

in Jindal Global Law Review 5 (1), Special Issue on Law, Culture and Queer Sexualities, Sonipat: Jindal Global University, 2012.

Imagining Alternative Universalisms: Intersectionality and the Limits of Liberal Discourse

in Davina Cooper, Didi Herman, Emily Grabham and Jane Krishnadas (Eds.), Intersectionality and Beyond: Law, Power and the Politics of Location, London: Routledge and Cavendish, 2008.

The Uniform Civil Code: The Politics of the Universal in Postcolonial India

in Feminist Legal Studies (2006) 14/ 3: 293 — 328.

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.

Sir Jadunath Sarkar Fellowship for Indian History

Awarded by the Foundation for Indian Historical and Cultural Research (FIHCR), 2024 - 25.
Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research Fellowship.

As a Fulbright Fellow, she was affiliated to the School of Law, Emory University, Atlanta.
Fellowship of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IIAS), Shimla.
The Charles Wallace Trust's Postdoctoral Fellowship

School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.
Gender, Sexuality and Law Visiting Fellowship,

School of Law, Keele University, U.K.
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.