South Asia Center affiliate faculty Sangram Majumdar and Kavita Dattani have recently been awarded funding from the University of Washington’s Royalty Research Fund (RRF). 
Majumdar, an assistant professor in painting and drawing in the School of Art + Art History + Design, received funding for his project “Performing Places.” According to Majumdar, “Performing Places” will expand on a recent exhibition in India. “My primary research will delve into studying onsite local art forms in various parts of India, including museum collections in New York and Mumbai, the Durga Puja festival in Kolkata, and research into expatriated artifacts such as Tipu’s Tiger in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London,” he said.
Dattani, an assistant professor in the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies, will use her RRF award to support research and writing for her upcoming book “A Suitable Swipe: Leisure, Pleasure, and Dating Apps in Mumbai.” This project will expand on research Dattani conducted as part of her Ph.D. thesis at the Queen Mary University of London looking at the ways in which “dating apps are being adopted by young middle-class heterosexual and non-heterosexual women and gender minorities in Mumbai.”
The RRF is a competitive program that offers research support to faculty at the University of Washington and is funded by income from royalty and licensing fees generated by the university’s technology transfer efforts.