Hi! I’m Pranathi (pruh-nuh-TEE).
I’m a writer and researcher of music, politics, and urban life with sociological and ethnographic training from my time as a doctoral student at the University of Chicago. I graduated with a PhD in Sociology in August 2022, and I’m currently a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. My dissertation won the 2022 Saller Prize for the most outstanding dissertation in the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. My writing has been published in academic journals like Social Forces and City & Community, and a range of edited volumes.
As a sociologist, I’m always looking for ways to use my training to tell compelling, thoroughly researched stories about how culture intersects with the politics of social, political, and spatial identities across geographies. Interviewing and teaching have honed my communication skills, and I’ve put them to use in collaborations with various stakeholders to produce public programming for Starlight, a community arts space on Chicago’s Devon Ave., and the Smart Museum of Art. I have also worked with New York Public Radio’s WQXR as a researcher and team member of the Every Voice podcast. My interests in research, writing, and audio, and the cultural realms of food, art, and music propel me to find new ways to learn and communicate knowledge of people, processes, and phenomena in the social world in meaningful ways. Growing up between Los Angeles and Chennai, India made me keenly aware of the workings of social power and social justice across different contexts, and I am committed to unpacking these parallels and distinctions in all my personal projects.
Presently, I’m working on a book project based on my doctoral dissertation research that investigates the relationships between music, caste discrimination, and urban politics in contemporary India. I also manage several personal audio and music projects, which you can read more about here.