While at SCAS, Sahana Ghosh will work on a book manuscript on the gendered work and value of soldiering in postcolonial India. How is military labor re/produced, experienced, and made meaningful as a profession by state institutions, recruits, and the communities to whom they belong? The book project explores this question through a historical ethnography of the training, professional biographies, and family lives of multiple generations of soldiers and officers in India’s quarter million strong Border Security Force. It joins recent critical scholarship that moves away from focusing on either frontlines of war and conflict or the effects of security institutions on marginal groups to examining instead the everyday institutional lives, social relations, and logics through which military labor – and state security regimes – are shaped and sustained. Centering gendered economies and social reproduction as fundamental to the work and value of soldiering, both inside and outside such security forces, the book traces the social costs of war-preparedness as militarism becomes desirable and durable in the postcolonial world.

Sahana Ghosh will be a Fellow at SCAS during the fall of 2025.

At SCAS, Professor Jane Shaw will be working on a book, Seeking Infinity: Mystics in the Modern World (contracted to Penguin Allen Lane), an intellectual and cultural history of the revival of mysticism in the early twentieth century, which analyses that revival as part of a broader movement away from institutional religion and towards “spirituality.”

She will be a Fellow at SCAS during the fall of 2025.

Samuli Simelius' project while at SCAS, “Roman Urban Inequality Beyond Social Stratification: Challenging Identities from Below”, examines urban health and wealth inequality in the Roman world from the mid-2nd century BCE to the 4th century CE. The study centers on two main questions: 1) How did health and wealth inequality influence each other and shape social stratification in Roman cities? 2) How did health and wealth inequality develop in Roman urban contexts? The main aim is to develop a new approach to studying Roman urban inequality through a comparative analysis of material sources that have not been extensively studied before. The work primarily involves an investigation of private property, its spatial qualities, and its connections to the larger urban context. This will result in a novel understanding of the complexity of Roman urban society and inequality, extending beyond social ranking alone. The core source material consists of the archaeological remains of seven Roman cities: Ostia, Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Rome (Italy); Delos (Greece); Priene (Türkiye); and Timgad (Algeria). This is a multiyear project, and at SCAS, the focus is on Delos and Priene.

He will be a SCAS-Nordic Fellow at SCAS during the academic year 2025–26.