Research

Dr. Munjulika is a scholar of South Asian performance cultures with a focus on the history and politics of Bangladeshi dance. Her previous publications have engaged with cultural diplomacy between Bangladesh and India, postcolonial analysis of “Oriental” dance costumes, and racial and socio-historical contexts of intercultural dance productions. Please click the links below to access her scholarship. 

​

Her book Dancing Ritiniti: Aesthetic Morality and Womanhood in Bangladesh, which is under contract with Oxford University Press, examines the ideological frameworks of dance practices in urban Bangladesh in order to gain a culturally-specific understanding of operations of power, privilege, and hierarchy. Dancing Ritiniti is an ethnographic and historical study of the experience of Bangladeshi middle-class women dancers that expands theorizations of the relationship between culture, nation, language, and the body.