Mr. Lucas Cole Joshi is scholar of Afro-Asian studies. Born to an Indian father and biracial mother, Mr. Joshi now attends Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, graduating in the spring of 2022. At Dartmouth, he served as the Founder and Co-President of cultural magazine, Dear Dartmouth and as the Founder and President of (post)-colonial book club, Chapter Two. A recipient of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, Mr. Joshi worked alongside undergraduate scholars of color in the production of his own research grounded in themes of mourning and memory in a (post)-colonial lens. His honors thesis, entitled “With Deepest Sympathy, a New Mourning in the Hour of Basque Reconciliation,” complicates notions of victimhood and reconciliation as it would lend itself to the post-terrorism era of the Basque Country. Mr. Joshi is a co-author of the book, Transatlantic Letters: An Epistolary Exchange Between Basque and US Students on Violence and Community published within the Human Rights Collection of Deusto University.
Upon completion of the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Mr. Joshi will pursue his PhD in Comparative Literature at Brown University. At Brown, he will work alongside professors Leela Gandhi and Leila Lenhen in responding to questions of the Indian Ocean as an autonomous body of violation and solidarity. Ultimately, he intends to realign Afro-Asian Studies through an emphasis on critical mixed-race theories and affinities.
A relic of the Portuguese colonial era, Goa’s Civil Code presents a complex story of labor governance and rights, particularly with respect to domestic workers throughout the community. Through this research, Mr. Joshi’s Fulbright-Nehru project is investigating the contemporary conditions that define the lives and livelihoods of domestic workers in Goa. Further, he is contextualizing domestic labor as a continuation of the legacy of Afro-Asian enslavement. The project represents a deeper inquiry into the labor that has stood as the backbone of Goa: once the “Rome of the East” and now the heart of Indian interculturality.