Dr. Malvika Sharma obtained her B.Sc. from Miranda House, University of Delhi. She completed her master’s in sociology from Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD) in 2015. She joined Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi and completed her M.Phil. in sociology from the Centre for the Study of Social Systems in 2017. She then went on to earn her Ph.D. in sociology from JNU in 2022. In the same year, she joined the Institute of Economic Growth, New Delhi as Sir Ratan Tata Fellow in Sociology. She is also a recipient of Junior Research Fellowship (JRF) in sociology from UGC, Government of India, and a short joint research-writing grant from the University of Victoria, Canada in association with South Asian University, New Delhi.

Dr. Sharma’s research work is largely in the field of sociology of everyday religion, ethnic, national and religious identities, and partition studies. Her work has appeared in key social science journals, such as HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Asian Ethnicity, Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, and Social Identities.

Dr. Sharma belongs to a borderland district Poonch located near the line of control in Jammu and Kashmir. Her Ph.D. research is largely based on this region, where she has explored ethnic and religious identities while simultaneously reading the 1947 Partition and everyday religion in the Indian sub-continent in terms of religious non-binaries. Her postdoctoral work continues to explore such identities near the line-of-control. Through an inquiry into the everyday intercommunity interactions in a multi-religious ethnic group situated here, Dr. Sharma’s Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research fellowship project unfolds plurality by focusing on an essential question: how people with differences and boundaries live together. Her work is a much-needed discussion on how to read Partition, conflict, and dispute in Jammu and Kashmir from the vantage position of non-dominant ethnicities and identities that form essential yet vulnerable diversities in the region.