Vidhya Raveendranathan
Vidhya Raveendranathan is a Visiting Research Fellow at the GBZ. She is a historian specializing in early colonial India, and her dissertation completed from the Centre for Modern Indian Studies at the University of Göttingen has delineated the evolution of wage labor relations alongside the legal and bureaucratic frameworks established by the English East India Company in the port city of Madras, South India.
During her tenure at GBZ, her research project will examine the long history of contracts and their profound interconnections with the quotidian organization of state power in early colonial India. This exploration intertwines a legal historical perspective, which necessitates viewing contracts as enforceable legal instruments through judicial institutions, with a social historical approach that encourages an understanding of contracts as mediating forces among diverse social and economic relationships.
She has been the recipient of multiple writing fellowships from the German Historical Institute, the European Research Council, and the New York University Luce Foundation. She has considerable teaching experiences having taught at the universities of Goettingen, Shanghai and Bangalore and has publications in journals such as the History Compass, Journal of Urban History and several edited volumes.