With immeasurable grief and regret we announce the untimely death of our beloved alumna Megha Sharma Sehdev who took her own life on August 17, 2023.  Megha was born in Windsor, Ontario.  She had a very difficult and violent childhood which she faced with courage and fortitude.  Megha was enrolled at Wayne State University for a brief period before running away from home.  Receiving state protection, she went on to attend the University of British Columbia under a different name.  She graduated with a B.A. in South Asian Studies from UBC in 2005 and received an M.A. in Medical Anthropology from McGill University in 2009 and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Johns Hopkins University in 2018.  Subsequently, she held postdoctoral fellowships at Tufts University, McGill University, and l’Université du Québec à Montréal and was recently recruited by the University of Toronto at Mississauga to their Language Studies Department.

Megha was a brilliant scholar who inspired everyone in her vicinity with her creativity and courage to take up extremely difficult questions in her diverse pursuits.  She did not make sharp distinctions between her life and her scholarship.  The signature themes she studied were domestic violence, ethics of care, and the sensory texture of the law.  Her dissertation “Interim Artifacts of Law: Interruption and Absorption in Indian Domestic Violence Cases” is an outstanding analysis of domestic violence in all its complexities – in the way it appeared in courts, in memories, in broken dreams, in stories that women told themselves as well as to Megha. She shared her enthusiasm for ideas and making unexpected connections in what she saw and read with her friends, colleagues and students.  For instance, she transformed a practicum on feminist methodology by sharing with students her own fieldwork experiences and artifacts and showing them how to connect their experiences to their work for activist NGOs.  She was particularly attentive in her instruction to first generation college students, evincing a deep empathy towards those she sensed as grappling with the consequences of domestic violence. 

As a graduate fellow for the Center for Advanced Media Studies at Johns Hopkins University she curated an exhibition titled “Hidden Museums of Crochet,” comprising a series of her photographic prints of various household items that women in India had crocheted for their trousseaux. While a postdoctoral fellow at Tufts she was actively involved in the bhangra projects of students of the area.  Her love for the Punjabi language, its poetry and folklore, was infectious and she regularly participated in online baithaks on Punjabi poetry.  She was ever ready to take initiative in bringing people together in important conversations.  At the immediate outset of the pandemic, she founded a global network entitled “Viral Conjunctions” in which a diverse range of people from all parts of the world, including scholars, activists, and professionals, shared their critical thinking on different aspects of the pandemic.  For many who felt very isolated during this period this network was like a life support.  Megha who had very beautiful dreams and very dark nightmares and the skill to capture them both on texts and in camera is survived by Prof. Andrew Ivaska and mourned by friends, teachers, colleagues, and family.

For support, please feel free to reach out to the Counseling Center at 410-516-8278, the Crisis Counselor at 410-516-8278 (press “1” to connect to the on-call counselor anytime) or to Naveeda Khan, Chair of Anthropology, available at [email protected], for help finding appropriate support services.