Dr. Rumya S. Putcha’s venture to the professoriate was a “series of happy accidents.”
The assistant professor of performance studies at Texas A&M University (TAMU) initially set out for law school until her undergraduate thesis based on her experiences as part of the immigrant Indian community – and being a dancer in that community – caught the eye of a professor in a separate department.
“That person reached out to me and said, ‘Hey, there’s a whole field that studies these sorts of identity formations. Would you want to talk about it?’ I said ‘Yeah,’ and the rest is sort of history,” Putcha says.
Having attended the University of Chicago for her bachelor’s degree and Ph.D., Putcha’s scholarship sits at the intersection of performance studies, ethnomusicology, critical race theory and gender and sexuality studies, with a particular focus on South Asia and the United States.
Much of her work aims to craft language and give voice to the experiences of “minoritarian” identities. It also comes out of recognition that behaviors are conditioned, including how individuals code switch in certain spaces, Putcha says.
“Performance studies does a really great job at understanding this idea that behavior and social life is performative – what we wear, how we talk – especially for those of us who have racialized positions in this country,” Putcha notes, adding that “racialized bodies are inherently sexualized.”
“To think about all of those things as interconnected and in need of a critical dismantling is how the various threads of my work go together,” she says.
