Graduate student, Nastasia Paul-Gera passed her General Exam with flying colors this morning. Her committee members, Professors Priti Ramamurthy, Cricket Keating, Sunila Kale, Radhika Govindrajan, Purnima Dhavan were unanimous in finding her essays of excellent quality, with an admirable capacity to weave together huge literatures - on Gender and Sexuality, Feminist Science Studies and Political Ecology, Development and Conservation, Interspecies Studies, South Asian Studies - insightfully and generously. Nastasia's answers to questions and comments on her exams and proposal were deliberated and thoughtful, they reflected her deep engagement with her material.
Her exam questions built, in part, on her MA thesis, "Ecologies of Power: A Feminist History of State Building in the Gond Kingdom of Garha, 1500-1870s,” which won the UW Graduate School's 2022 Distinguished Thesis Award for the best MA in the Social Sciences. Nastasia will now embark on her remarkable dissertation project, "Producing Wildness: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Wildlife Tourism" in Satpura National Park in central India.
Congratulations, Nastasia!