Professor Kama Maclean
BA PhD La Trobe, Grad Dip L & T UNSW
Dr Kama Maclean is an Honorary Professor in the School of Humanities and Languages. From 2003 to 2020, she taught South Asian and World History at UNSW. She is currently based at the University of Heidelberg, in Germany, where she holds the Chair of History in the South Asia Institute.
Professor Maclean’s first book, Pilgrimage and Power (OUP, 2008), examined the history of the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, and was awarded an honourable mention in the AAS’s Coomaraswamy Book Prize in 2009. Her second book, A Revolutionary History of Interwar India (OUP 2015), demonstrated that the oft-averred dominance of Gandhian nonviolence in the historiography of the nationalist movement was not supported by a close examination of a range of oral, material and visual culture sources. A Revolutionary History is currently being translated into Hindi.
Her third book, British India, White Australia: Overseas Indians, Intercolonial Relations and the Empire, 1901-1947 (UNSW Press, 2020), makes interventions into South Asian, Australian and imperial histories by demonstrating the triangular relationship between Australia, India and Britain in the early twentieth century. The book shows how this imperial dynamic impacted on British Indian settlers in Australia, with reference to debates about colonialism, independence and dominionhood. British India White Australia was shortlisted for several prizes, including the ICAS Prize for Humanities, and was highly commended for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.
Kama Maclean is also the author of several other articles, and was from 2010-2023 the Editor of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies.
Her current research and teaching activities at the South Asia Institute work towards and urge the importance of a multisensory historical methodology for South Asian Studies. She is currently working on a DFG-funded research project on Sonic Aspects of Anticolonialism in Interwar India. She is available for co-supervision at UNSW. Further information about the Department of History in the South Asia Institute can be found .
- Publications
- Media
- Grants
- Awards
- Research Activities
- Engagement
- Teaching and Supervision
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft,‘A sonic approach to Interwar India’, 2023.
Australian Research Council, Future Fellowship Grant, ‘A sonic approach to Interwar India’, 2021, $1,011,852. (declined, due to appointment at the University of Heidelberg)
Australian Research Council (ARC), Discovery Grant, ‘Imagining India in White Australia: Intercolonial relations and the empire: 1901-1950’, (2012-15) $150, 000.
Australia India Institute Grant, ‘People to People: Australia-India Relationships in the Twentieth Century’, 2011, $20 000.
Prizes, Awards and Fellowships
2021 Highly Commended, Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards; Shortlisted for the Ernest Scott Prize; and the Humanities ICAS Book Prize, for British India, White Australia
2020 Shortlisted for the Australian History Prize in the NSW Premier's History Awards 2020 for British India, White Australia
2019 Global Scholarly Impact Award, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences UNSW, for A Revolutionary History of Interwar India
2019 Fellow, National Library of Australia
2018 Book Subvention, Australian Academy of Humanities
2018 Inducted into the Australian Academy of Humanities
2009 Honourable Mention, The Kentish Anand Coomaraswamy Book Prize (AAS), for Pilgrimage and Power
2009 Professorial Research Fellow, United Arab Emirates University
2004 Australian Academy of the Humanities Fieldwork Fellowship
2003 ASSA Presidents’ Prize for Best Doctorial Thesis in Asian Studies
2007 Association of Asian Studies (AAS) First Book Subvention
2005 Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Post-Doctoral Writing Award
1998 La Trobe University Postgraduate Scholarship
1998 La Trobe Politics Department Postgraduate Award
Kama Maclean's current projectaims to apply the methods of Sound Studies to a study of the history of anticolonialism in India. Extending on her earlier work, which draws extensively on visual archives to construct historical narratives, this project aims to explicitly trace the reverberations of sound - especially mediated speech, slogans and songs - in anticolonial mobilisation in the interwar period. Orality was a critical element of political communication, which, partly due to the difficulties in capturing the spoken word, has not yet been studied in detail. Yet the archives are full of sound.
The deeply affective qualities inherent in sounds, and the growth of technologies to amplify and record them in the period under investigation, renders this a rich approach to understanding anticolonial politics beyond the widely-acknowledged constraints of the colonial archive. The key objectives are to locate sonic traces in the archive, drawing on audio recordings, texts, visual and oral histories to discern their impact; to develop an understanding of the potency of sounds in creating communities and communicating nationalist messages, while evading censorship; and to trace the impact of early recording and sound projection technologies on nationalist mobilisation, to demonstrate how such technologies disrupted prevailing soundscapes and shifted political dynamics, in the context of the civil disobedience movement. Further information on the project, which is funded by the Deutsche Forshungsgemeinschaft, is available .
My Teaching
Kama Maclean coordinates and teaches two courses, Modern India: British Raj to Bollywood (second year) and Powerful India (third year). She also teaches History and Asian Studies Honours.