Associate Professor, Geography
Core Faculty Member, Dhar India Studies; Affiliate Faculty, Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society, Cultural Studies, Asian American Studies, Critical Race and Postcolonial Studies, Islamic Studies; Adjunct Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Ishan Ashutosh is a human geographer whose research advances two fundamental issues of geography— human mobility and the production of space. Working at the intersection of political, urban, cultural, and historical geographies, Dr. Ashutosh is interested in how the movement of people, ideas, and commodities re-envision and reinforce geopolitical divides. His research focuses on the production of South Asia along two lines of inquiry. The first concerns South Asian diasporas, whose histories and experiences of spatial dispersal and connection reimagine the region through transnational forms of belonging and political solidarities. The second examines social scientific constructions of South Asia, particularly in American geography and its relationship with other social sciences. By looking at how social scientists have constructed South Asia as a region over time, he explores how this vast region was configured by the convergence of scholarship, colonialism, and American foreign policy. Juxtaposing these two readings of South Asia alongside one another— South Asian diasporic understandings of the region alongside social scientific mappings of the region— Dr. Ashutosh’s research exposes the complex geographies through which people invest social and political meanings to place.
Dr. Ashutosh’s research program carves out an interdisciplinary space that synthesizes human geography’s abiding concern with how spaces are made by human activity and the critiques of race and cultural difference launched from postcolonial, Asian American, and migration/diaspora studies. His publications include articles in Racial and Ethnic Studies, Progress in Human Geography, Geography Compass, Diaspora, Journal of Historical Geography, Geographical Review, South Asian Diaspora, and Citizenship Studies.
The College of Arts