Research Scholar and Lecturer Dr. Mallika Leuzinger
Contact Information
Dr. Mallika Leuzinger
Karl Jaspers Centre
Voßstraße 2, Building 4400
Room 400.01.06
69115 Heidelberg
Germany
+49 (0) 6221 54 4365
mallika.leuzinger@hcts.uni-heidelberg.de
Office Hours Wednesdays, 1-2.30 PM or by appointment. Please register vial e-mail.
About
Mallika Leuzinger joined the Department in 2026. Her work explores the development of postcolonial modernity through everyday technologies and media and across geographies and generations. Her forthcoming monograph, The Constant Image: Intimacy, Amateurism and the Camera in South Asia, traces how Haleema Hashim, a Kutchi Memon woman settled in the port city of Cochin, and the itinerant Bengali twin sisters Debalina Mazumder and Manobina Roy, took up photography in the twentieth century. It offers an analysis of their practices that is attuned to the politics of gender, race, caste and class and the varying extent to which they were recognised by their families and a wider public.
Mallika’s current research grapples with the construction and transformation of the historical imagination in the twenty-first century. It is an ethnography of citizens’ archives, memory projects, picture libraries and heritage groups run by South Asians on and offline. She is also interested in pursuing comparative case studies and contributing to an Inter-Asian conversation around how postcolonial modernity is experienced, or rather, visualised, materialised and memorialised.
Mallika was previously a Fung Global Fellow at Princeton University and a Fellow in Colonial and Global History at the German Historical Institute London. She has also held fellowships at the Zentrum Moderner Orient, University of Edinburgh (IASH), National University Singapore (ARI) and ICAS:MP New Delhi, and worked at the Fotomuseum Winterthur.
Curriculum Vitae (excerpt)
- PhD in History of Art, University College London
- MPhil in Gender Studies, University of Cambridge
- BA in History (Part I in Archaeology and Anthropology), University of Cambridge
Research Interests
- Everyday technologies and media
- Visual culture
- Postcolonial modernity
- South Asian migration and diaspora histories
- Heritage and memory politics
- Inter-Asia and South-South connections
Selected Publications
- “Amateurism, or the strange and radical kinship of the camera” in Framing Portraits, Binding Albums: Family Photographs in India edited by Suryanandini Narain and Shilpi Goswami, New Delhi: Zubaan, 2025, pp. 407-440.
- “Projecting empowerment: camera politics in and beyond twentieth-century South Asia” in Dastavezi – The Audio-Visual South Asia, Volume 4, 2022, pp. 8-44
- “‘Ummijaan’s pictures were nice’: thinking about Haleema Hashim’s photography” in Trans Asia Photography, Volume 10, Issue 1: Writing Photo Histories, Fall 2019
- “The Intimate Contract of Photography: Haleema Hashim’s Practice and its Afterlives” in Object – Graduate Research & Reviews in the History of Art and Visual Culture, Vol. 19, 2017, pp. 29-54
- “From Dumka to New Delhi: Conversations”, chapter in Cadence and Counterpoint: Documenting Santal Musical Traditions edited by Johannes Beltz, Marie Eve Celio-Scheurer and Ruchira Ghose, New Delhi: Niyogi Press, 2015, pp.80-87 (co-authored with Mushtak Khan and Krittika Narula)
Curation
Twin Sisters with Cameras: an exhibition of photographs by Debalina Mazumder and Manobina Roy (co-curated with Sabeena Gadihoke and Tapati Guha-Thakurta) at Jadunath Bhavan Museum and Resource Centre, Kolkata, 24 Feb – 31 Mar 2022; India International Centre, New Delhi, 13 – 27 Aug 2022; Lalit Kala Academy, Lucknow, 3 – 12 Aug 2023; Bangalore International Centre, Bangalore, 18 – 25 Oct 2023; Indian Photo Festival, Hyderabad, 21 Nov – 5 Jan 2025, National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai, 9 – 26 October 2025