Siddharth Pandey
Siddharth Pandey belongs to the Shimla Himalayas and has a PhD in English and Materiality Studies from Cambridge University. He has held fellowships and grants in global history, art history and colonial history at LMU, Yale, the Paul Mellon Centre, and the Charles Wallace India Trust. Pandey’s research interests include fantasy and children’s literature, nature and travel writing, craft theory, folk and popular culture. His first book, Fossil, explored the Himalayas through a geo-mythological-poetic lens, and is a finalist for the Banff Film and Mountain Literature Festival. His photographic-curatorial work has appeared in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and Durham’s Oriental Museum, among other institutions.
‘The Fissured Land’: Ecological Aesthetics, Dwelling Perspective, and Modernity’s Entanglements in the Western Himalayas
Siddharths’s project studies the Himachal Himalayas as a terrain of belonging and natural-cultural rootedness. It also looks into how this sense of belonging —traditionally associated with a sensitive ecological attunement and aesthetic fulfilment — is threatened by modernity’s multifaceted pressures, which invariably lead to a growing sense of disconnection.