Avash Bhandari
PIF Fellow
About
Avash Bhandari is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the History Department at UIC and a recipient of PIF Fellowship 2017. His doctoral research focuses on the social and environmental history of northern South Asia and Nepal in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. He concentrates specifically on forests on the southern frontier of Nepal and how various forest resources were extracted and mobilized by the non-colonial Gorkhali/Nepali state in the broader context of British imperialism in South Asia. He is currently in South Asia conducting his dissertation research.
Avash holds a master’s degree in Sociology from Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu, Nepal. His master’s thesis examined the complex ties between various state institutions and a Hindu school in the immediate context of the newly secular Nepali state. He was Tasveer Ghar’s “Manly Matters: Representation of Maleness in South Asian Popular Visual Practice” Fellow from 2017-18. He has published several articles and book reviews in journals and online portals such as Studies in Nepali History and Society, Samaj Adhyayan, Asian Ethnology, and Tasveer Ghar. His publications are available at https://uic.academia.edu/AvashBhandari.