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Please join the South Asia Resesarch Forum for this talk given by Julia Stephens, Associate Professor (Rutgers University)

Professor Julia Stephens explores how the descendants of migrants who travelled the Indian Ocean during the long nineteenth century are harnessing digital media to build new vistas of global public history. Academic historians often dismiss family roots researchers as hobbyists who uncritically reproduce elitist and ethno-nationalist conceptions of pedigree. In contrast, families with ties to the Indian Ocean demonstrate keen awareness of the cultural biases of Ancestry.com, the exploitative economics of DNA genealogy, and the manipulations of algorithms. Rather than pawns to profit-seeking companies, these families work against the grain of popular genealogy tools to craft histories that center women and South-South migrations. In contexts where their families’ stories have been officially marginalized, root researchers demonstrate the importance of platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram to practices of history “from below” in the Global South. Questioning the power dynamics around publicly engaged scholarship, Stephens argues that academics have as much to learn from roots researchers as they do from us. The talk draws from Professor Stephens’ new book, Worldly Afterlives: Tracing Family Trails Between India and Empire (Princeton University Press, December 2025).

Julia Stephens is an associate professor in the History Department at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is the author of Governing Islam: Law, Empire, and Secularism in Modern South Asia (Cambridge, 2018). Her current work on empire, diaspora, and family history has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Centre for History and Economics at Cambridge University, the Social Science Research Council, and the Humanities Research Fellowship at NYU-Abu Dhabi. She is an award-winning teacher who finds daily inspiration for her research in her courses on Modern South Asia, Islam, World History, and feminist historical methods.