Devika Chawla, Ph.D.
Professor Chawla is the Stocker Professor of Interpersonal Communication in the School of Communication Studies and an Ohio University Presidential Research Scholar. Her scholarly work focuses on communicative, performative, and narrative approaches to studying family, home, and its relationship to social identity. Specifically, she attends to how human beings transform themselves in the relationships that surround them, and the resources—social, political, economic—that are available to them. Much of Professor Chawla’s research has taken place in the context of marriage and family life in contemporary urban north India. She accesses ethnographic practices including fieldwork, oral history, and life history to study in this context. Her award-winning doctoral dissertation was a life history study of urban Indian women’s identities in Hindu arranged marriages. Her book Home, Uprooted: Oral Histories of India’s Partition focused on cross-generational oral histories of refugees displaced by India’s Partition of 1947 and was awarded the book of the year by two divisions (Ethnography; International and Intercultural) of the National Communication Association. Professor Chawla has published three other edited/co-authored books and over 50 essays in peer-reviewed journals and anthologies. She is currently at work on two linked book-length monographs—the first focuses on decolonial epistemologies (under-contract with Routledge), and the second is an auto/ethnographic text on family life, objects, affect, and migration.
Professor Chawla teaches doctoral courses in communication theory/s, post- and decolonial theories, performance methods, critical ethnography, and qualitative analysis. At the undergraduate level, she teaches gender in communication, family communication, life-writing and autoethnography, performance studies, communication among cultures, and qualitative methods.
Professor Chawla is the past Editor-in-Chief of the University of California Press journal, Departures in Critical Qualitative Research. She was Senior Editor (for south Asia and southeast Asia) for the Oxford University Press Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Communication. She is past Chair of the National Communication Association’s (NCA), Publications Council, which oversees the association's publications program, including recommending editors to the Legislative Assembly for NCA’s 12 journals and filling journal editor vacancies as necessary.
Professor Chawla received her Bachelor’s (Honors) degree in English Literature and Literary Criticism from the University of Delhi. She holds two M.A. degrees; the first in English Print Journalism, from the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, New Delhi, and the second in Speech Communication and Dramatic Arts from Central Michigan University. She received her Ph.D. in Communication Studies
(Interpersonal Communication) with a minor specialization in Family Studies and Social Anthropology from Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana.