Brock DeMark is a PhD student at Indiana University (IU), Bloomington, studying modern Indian history, British colonial/imperial history, and urban development. Before his doctoral coursework, Brock lived in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where he completed his bachelor’s degree in history and English literature at the University of Arkansas in 2019. At IU, Brock has served as the leader of its History Department’s Graduate Student Association. He organized a national conference for history graduate students in Bloomington in 2022. Brock is also active in IU’s Dhar India Studies Program, practicing his Hindi at weekly conversation table meetings, attending Hindi and Urdu movie events, and composing poems in Hindi. Besides, Brock spent the summer of 2022 in Jaipur, India, studying Hindi under the Critical Language Scholarship Program.
Brock’s dissertation research is an urban history project that examines the “fabrication” of Kanpur, India – a global industrial hub – in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The word “fabrication” denotes both “invention” and a “process of constructing, fashioning, and manufacture”. Attentive to the ways in which Kanpur was “fabricated” in both senses of the word – how it was invented as a place that people would be interested in going to find work or investing money, as well as the processes and relationships that led to the construction of the city’s material infrastructure – Brock’s project seeks to make a unique contribution to the scholarly understandings of habitability and community-formation during the colonial period. Brock’s dissertation is drawing on written sources in English and Hindi located in the libraries and archives of Kanpur, Lucknow, Delhi, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
When he is not researching, writing, or reading about Indian history, Brock enjoys hiking, playing basketball, reading popular astronomy articles, and drinking lassi with his partner, Savannah.
Brock’s Fulbright-Nehru project is examining the growth and development of Kanpur from 1870 to 1930. The primary goal is to understand how uneven relationships of power between European industrialists, municipal officials, and Indian residents shaped the design of the city. A relatively small commercial mart and military depot that expanded rapidly during the first few decades of the Crown rule, Kanpur grew up alongside the colonial state itself. As such, Kanpur offers a unique insight into the discrepancies between what the colonial state claimed about its development projects versus their impact on the everyday life of Indian residents.