{"id":3808,"date":"2020-09-04T23:47:08","date_gmt":"2020-09-04T23:47:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dance.ucr.edu\/?page_id=3808"},"modified":"2025-08-29T13:40:21","modified_gmt":"2025-08-29T20:40:21","slug":"anusha-kedhar","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/dance.ucr.edu\/faculty\/anusha-kedhar\/","title":{"rendered":"Anusha Kedhar"},"content":{"rendered":"[vc_row][vc_column width=”2\/3″][vc_column_text animation=”fadeInUp”]ANUSHA KEDHAR (She\/Her\/Hers)\r\n<\/strong>Associate Professor & Graduate Advisor<\/strong>\r\n\r\nAnusha Kedhar\u00a0is a scholar and practitioner of bharatanatyam. She was born and raised in Southern California and later lived and worked in London, UK for several years as a professional dancer. She attended University of California, Berkeley (BA, Development Studies), London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (MS, Demography), and University of California, Riverside (Ph.D, Critical Dance Studies.) where she received her doctorate in 2011. Her research interests include dance in India and the Indian diaspora, caste and corporeality, dance and global political economy, and ethnographic methods in dance studies.\r\n\r\nKedhar\u2019s book,\u00a0Flexible Bodies: British South Asian Dancers in an Age of Neoliberalism<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(2020), winner of the Emory Elliot Book Award from the Center for Ideas and Society at UC Riverside and the Sally Banes Publication Prize from the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR), focuses on South Asian dancers in the UK and the creative ways in which they negotiate the demands of neoliberal, multicultural dance markets through an array of flexible bodily practices, including agility, versatility, mobility, speed, and risk-taking. Bringing together economic theories of flexible labor with embodied notions of flexibility in dance, the book re-frames flexibility as both a tool of labor exploitation as well as a bodily skill that dancers cultivate to navigate neoliberal multiculturalism. Kedhar\u2019s other writing on choreography, gesture, and the Black Lives Matter protests has been featured in\u00a0The Feminist Wire<\/em>\u00a0<\/a>and\u00a0The New York Times<\/em><\/a>.\r\n\r\nHer current research examines the corpo-aesthetics and choreopolitics of caste (brahminism) and gender in bharatanatyam pedagogy and performance. She is a co-Investigator with Dr. Prarthana Purkayastha (Royal Holloway University, UK) and Dr. Royona Mitra (Brunel University, UK)\u00a0on a project titled \u201cSouth Asian Dance Equity (SADE): The Arts British South Asian Dance Ignores<\/a>,\u201d which is being funded by the UK\u2019s Arts and Humanities Research Council. She is also the founder and co-curator of the Caste and Corporeality conference<\/a> and is a founding member of the University of California Collective for Caste Abolition<\/a>.\r\n\r\nKedhar is an established performer and choreographer. Prior to coming to UCR, she trained in bharata natyam with Ramya Harishankar (US) and toured with Angika, a contemporary Indian dance company based in London, UK. She has also collaborated and performed with various contemporary South Asian choreographers in the US, UK, and Europe, including Mayuri Boonham (UK), Johanna Devi (Germany), Mavin Khoo (UK), Cynthia Ling Lee (US), Meena Murugesan (US), and Subathra Subramaniam (UK). Her solo choreography has been presented at the Southbank Centre (London), Mediterranean Institute for Theatre and Performance (Malta), UCLA (Los Angeles), Colorado College (Colorado), and Gibney Dance (New York). In 2008, Kedhar was a Fulbright Scholar to India and the recipient of the Selma Jeanne Cohen Award for dance scholarship. She has previously taught at Colorado College (2013-2017) and the University of Malta (2012-2013).\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nPUBLICATIONS<\/strong>\r\n\r\nBooks:<\/strong>\r\n\r\nKedhar, Anusha. <\/span>Flexible Bodies: British South Asian Dancers in an Age of Neoliberalism<\/span><\/i>. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.<\/span>\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nArticles\/Essays:<\/strong>\r\n<\/b>\r\n\r\nKedhar, Anusha. \u201cNow is the time. Come, come!: Gender, Caste, and Erotic Humor in Bharatanatyam.\u201d In\u00a0Funny Moves: Dance, Humor, Politics<\/i>, eds. Marta Savigliano and Hannah Schwadron.\u00a0New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2025.\r\n\r\nKedhar, Anusha. \u201cOccupying the Space of the Erotic: Gender, Sexuality, and Caste in Bharatanatyam\u00a0Padam<\/em>\u00a0Performance.\u201d\u00a0Oxford Handbook on Indian Dance<\/em> (eds. Anurima Banerji and Prarthana Purkayastha), forthcoming in 2025.\r\n\r\nKedhar, Anusha. “Choreographing Tolerance: Narendra Modi, Hindu Nationalism, and International Yoga Day,”\u00a0<\/span>Race and Yoga.\u00a0<\/span><\/i>Vol. 5 (1), 2020, pp. 42-58.\u00a0<\/span>\r\n\r\nKedhar, Anusha. \u201cBreaking Point?: Flexibility, Pain, and the Calculus of Risk in Neoliberal Multiculturalism.\u201d In <\/span>Futures of Dance Studies<\/span><\/i>, eds. Susan Manning, Rebecca Schneider, and Janice Ross. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2020, pp. 343-359.\u00a0<\/span>\r\n\r\nKedhar, Anusha. “It’s Time for a Caste Reckoning in Indian ‘Classical’ Dance,” in Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies: Decolonizing Dance Discourses <\/i>(edited\u00a0by Anurima Banerji and Royona Mitra), Vol. XL (2020): 16-19.\r\n\r\nBanerji, Anurima, Anusha Kedhar, Royona Mitra, Janet O’Shea, and Shanti Pillai. “Postcolonial Pedagogies: Recasting the Guru\u2013Shishya Parampara.”\u00a0Theatre Topics<\/i>\u00a027, no. 3 (2017): 221-230.\r\n\r\nKedhar, Anusha. \u201cChoreography and Gesture Play an Important Role in Protests\u201d <\/span>New York Times<\/span><\/i>, December 15, 2014. <\/span>http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/roomfordebate\/2014\/12\/15\/what-does-the-style-of-a-protest-say-about-a-movement\/choreography-and-gesture-play-an-important-role-in-protests<\/span><\/a>\u00a0<\/span>\r\n\r\nKedhar, Anusha. \u201cHands Up! Don\u2019t Shoot: Choreography, Gesture, and Protest in Ferguson.\u201d <\/span>The Feminist Wire<\/span><\/i>, October 6, 2014. <\/span>http:\/\/thefeministwire.com\/2014\/10\/protest-in-ferguson\/<\/span><\/a>\r\n\r\nKedhar, Anusha. \u201cFlexibility and its Bodily Limits: Transnational South Asian Dancers in an Age of Neoliberalism.\u201d <\/span>Dance Research Journal<\/span><\/i> 46, No. 1, April 2014, pp. 23-40.<\/span>[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][vc_column width=”1\/3″]
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ARTS 101<\/h4> <\/div> <\/div><\/div>
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anusha.kedhar@ucr.edu<\/h4> <\/div><\/a> <\/div><\/div>[\/vc_column][\/vc_row]","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[vc_row][vc_column width=”2\/3″][vc_column_text animation=”fadeInUp”]ANUSHA KEDHAR (She\/Her\/Hers) Associate Professor & Graduate Advisor Anusha Kedhar\u00a0is a scholar and practitioner of bharatanatyam. She was born and raised in Southern California and later lived and worked in London, UK for several years as a professional dancer. She attended University of California, Berkeley (BA, Development Studies), London School of Hygiene and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":2988,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-3808","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dance.ucr.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dance.ucr.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dance.ucr.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dance.ucr.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dance.ucr.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3808"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/dance.ucr.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3808\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6699,"href":"https:\/\/dance.ucr.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3808\/revisions\/6699"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dance.ucr.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dance.ucr.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}