Brooklyn-based visual artist Chitra Ganesh and Mrinaini Sinha, a history professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor,  have been named Guggenheim Fellows by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Ganesh, who was named in the field of fine arts, and Sinha, selected in the South Asian Studies category, were among the 181 fellows whose names were announced April 12.

They were selected from a group of about 3,000 applicants.

According to the foundation website, Ganesh’s work seeks to excavate buried narratives typically excluded from official canons of history, literature and art.

Born and raised in Brooklyn and Queens, Ganesh graduated from Brown University in 1996, magna cum laude, with a B.A. in comparative literature and art semiotics. In 2001, she attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and received her M.F.A. from Columbia University in 2002. 

Her work has been exhibited locally and internationally; a solo exhibition in Sweden will open in summer this year.
Sinha, the Alice Freeman Palmer Professor in the Department of History and professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, has written on various aspects of the political history of colonial India, with a focus on anticolonialism, gender and transnational approaches.

Her Guggenheim project, “Complete Political Independence: The Curious History of a Nationalist Indian Demand,” will explore the contingency of the development of the nation-state form in India.

Sinha has a B.A. from Lady Sri Ram College of Delhi University, an M.A. from the School of International Studies at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in history from Stony Brook University in New York.