“A Garland of Songs: Radio Ceylon and the Making of a Hindi Film Audience”
Abstract coming soon
Isabel Huacuja Alonso is an Assistant Professor at California State University, San Bernardino. She is completing a monograph about radio broadcasting in colonial India, and later in independent Pakistan, India, and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) tentatively titled, Radio for the Millions: Hindi-Urdu Broadcasting at the Crossroads of an Empire. The book expands on her dissertation (University of Texas at Austin 2015), which won the Sardar Patel Award for the best dissertation on modern India. More generally, Professor Huacuja Alonso’s scholarly work is concerned with the making and unmaking of borders and with individuals who have trespassed their societies’ intellectual and physical boundaries. In addition to her work on sound and borders, she has researched the Indian anti-colonial leader M. N. Roy’s unconventional sojourn in revolutionary Mexico and translated an excerpt of an Urdu-language radio travelogue on the Grand Trunk Road. The American Institutes of Indian and Pakistan Studies, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Institute for Historical Studies at UT Austin have funded her research. She has a forthcoming article in Public Culture and publications in South Asia, and SAGAR, in addition to various journalistic pieces in The Caravan, Scroll, and Algarabia.