Sonal Khullar received her B.A. from Wellesley in 2000, where she majored in Comparative Literature. Her honors thesis, “Engendering India: Mythologies of Gender in the Imagined Nation,“ considered the “highly anxious masculinity“ portrayed in the work of such writers as Kipling and Rushdie, in light of native Indian, Vedantic concepts of the feminine. She will enter the History of Art Department, where, broadly speaking, she means to come to grips with the visual culture of Indian modernity. She brings a strong background in literature, critical theory, and languages (English, Hindi, and French), as well as a consuming interest in what it means to be both Indian and modern—and principally in the visual expression of this sometimes dual, even paradoxical state. Khullar intends to pursue the larger questions of gender, nation, and modernity in the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century South Asia, and more particularly, to investigate the relationship between the emergence of a national culture and the modern nation state following Partition. She will focus her studies through the lens of contemporary Indian art, exploring “how women artists shaped and sculpted in their work masculinist renditions of Woman cast as Nation.“ Khullar’s mentor, Eve Meltzer of the Department of Rhetoric, held a Townsend Center Dissertation Fellowship in 2001-2002.