Jeychandran is completing her book Textured Pasts: Material Heritage and Traces of African-Asian Relations in the Oceanic South. She discusses how sacred architecture, materialities, and contemporary works of art link the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic worlds through transversal exchanges to foreground marginalized memories of African-Indian interculturalism and their relational similarities. In addition to the ongoing book project, she is working with members of the Sidi African-Indian community in Gujarat to create a digital platform (African Heritage India) to archive their oral histories, memories of migrations, religious landscapes, ritual performances, and contemporary cultural practices.
Aside from the monograph, she just finalised the edits of the upcoming edited volume Devotional Spaces of a Global Saint: Shirdi Sai Baba’s Presence (Routledge 2022) with Smriti Srinivas (UC, Davis) and Allen F. Roberts (UCLA). This volume features essays by noted scholars around the world and will explore social and historical contexts, charismatic networks, devotional practices, and visual images associated with the dynamic contemporary religious movement dedicated to Shirdi Sai Baba.
She is part of the project Tactics and Theories for a Global Asia Praxis, a multi-year program coordinated by the Verge journal and Global Asias Initiative at Penn State. Her collaborative research team is exploring the keyword “Transits” to expand the conversation on the study of Global Asias through the GA Summer Institute in June 2022 at Penn State, the Global Asias 6 conference in spring 2023, and a series of publications that will come out in 2024.
Neelima Jeychandran 