Student Profile

Kate Sullivan, BA (Hons) (York), MA (Heidelberg)

Currently in her second year of doctoral research in the Department, Kate is an India specialist working on the cusp of International Relations and South Asian Studies. Focusing on the way India has conceptualised itself as a 'great power' since Independence, her work aims to combine an internal and external analysis of India's status and identity in international society. By engaging in an anthropologically-informed study of Indian foreign policy elites and their wider social and historical contexts, she hopes to gain insights into the ways in which state actors in India shuttle between the idioms of 'modern' international politics and systems of meaning that derive from different cultural orders. The central question motivating Kate's research is: what kind of great power might India potentially turn out to be?

Kate's wider interests include Indian political thought and philosophy, Indian conceptualisations of the International, critical theory, and the Hindi language and its literature.

Kate has worked as a teaching and research assistant at the University of Heidelberg's South Asia Institute and currently lectures part-time in Hindi at the undergraduate level for the ANU's South Asia Centre. She recently published in the Economic and Political Weekly, has written for Opinion Asia, and was featured in the February 2008 edition of Asian Currents, the e-bulletin of the Asian Studies Association of Australia.

When not surgically attached to her desk, Kate is a keen runner and swimmer, an avid fan of both Bollywood and Argentine Tango, and a currently dogless dog lover.

Email: kate.sullivan@anu.edu.au