Sharvari is a Harper-Schmidt postdoctoral fellow and teaches in the Arts Core in the College. Her research probes the unruly entanglements between live performance and recorded history, with a regional and discursive focus on South Asia. She is interested in tracing how gender, sexuality, and caste-based essentializations are articulated and historicized through performance. Her first book project, Performances of Posterity: Theater, Archives and Cultural Regulation in Modern India excavates processes of cultural preservation and appropriation with respect to minoritarian performance cultures in the Maharashtra region, specifically tamasha and lavani. It tracks how these forms come to be denigrated, censored, reformed, reclaimed, and reinvented in accordance with prevailing political and social aspirations, and how theatre became the site and source of these contestations. She is currently working on a critical-creative project on the history of telephony – as technology, household apparatus, and stage prop in South Asia and other parts of the British Empire through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It probes how the the technological, sociopolitical and performative history of the telephone constellates questions of gender and sexuality, in the Indian subcontinent and beyond.