Katia Chaterji
Assistant Professor | Asian and Asian American Studies Loyola Marymount University
Biography
At LMU, Professor Chaterji teaches topics on Asian history, environmental justice, Islam, performance, and gender. She is also a cellist, Odissi dancer, and gamelan (Indonesian gong-chime orchestra) player. She blends her scholarship, teaching, and arts practice into her role as Faculty-in-Residence with LMU Housing for the Del Rey North residence hall.
Education
University of Chicago
B.A.
Anthropology and South Asian Languages & Civilizations
University of Washington
M.A.
History
University of Washington
Ph.D.
History
Social
Areas of Expertise
Accomplishments
Andrew W. Mellon Collaborative Fellowship for Reaching New Publics
2020-21
Fulbright-IIE Research Grant to Indonesia
2019-20
Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI), University of Victoria
2018
Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowships, Indonesian
2017 (UW-Madison); 2017-18 (UW-Seattle)
Fulbright English Teaching Assistant Fellowship, Malaysia
2012
Critical Language Scholarship, Indonesian
2016 (Universitas Negeri Malang)
Links
Languages
- English (native proficiency)
- Indonesian/Malay (advanced)
- Bengali (intermediate)
- French (reading proficiency)
Articles
Playing Here/There: Frame Drums and Oceanic Sufi Belonging in West Sumatra
Monsoon: Journal of the Indian Ocean RimKatia Chaterji
2026-11-15
The frame drum, an instrument that accompanied both the physical and spiritual journeys of travelers across the historical Indian Ocean trade routes, is shared amongst numerous performing arts traditions in Sumatra today, many of which claim origins in Sumatra’s Sufi past. These instruments become symbols of past migrations as well as of cultural transmission, processes that remain prescient in contemporary Islamic performing arts traditions across Southeast Asia. This article considers the frame drum as a sonic and tactile technology through which Sufi belonging is enacted across the Indian Ocean arena. It charts the broad history of frame drums and its associations with Sufi ritual, and draws upon the specific practice of salawat dulang in West Sumatra to show how the drum signals towards Sufi inheritances and draws practitioners into oceanic relationships of belonging.
Choreography as Decolonial Practice: Aesthetics of Piety and Modernity in West Sumatra’s Musabaqah Tilawatil Qur’an Competitions
Lembaran AntropologiKatia Chaterji, Susas Rita Loravianti
2026-06-15
This article explores two dance choreographies, Menghimpun Cahaya (Gathering Light) and Ziarah Surau Kota Hujan (Pilgrimage to the City of Rain’s Prayer Hall), performed at the opening ceremonies of West Sumatra’s Qur’anic recitation competitions (Musabaqah Tilawatil Qur’an, or MTQ) in 2019 and in 2021. While the MTQ have been studied as sites of performing piety, nationalism, and/or “goodness”; this article explores the role of choreography in articulating performative claims about Islamic knowledge production, cultural authority, and locally rooted constructs of modernity. Focusing on the MTQ as religious and political event, this article considers how choreographic practice shapes the construction of tradition and asserts the performing arts as a critical arena in which Minangkabau artists define their relationships to the past, present, and future of Muslim cultural identity. This article is in conversation with debates to decolonize performing arts and choreography through consideration of collaboration and autoethnography.
Performing Cosmology: Sound, Movement, and World-Making in the Turuk Lagai Ritual of Mentawai
Resital: Jurnal Seni PertunjukanSusas Rita Loravianti, Alfalah, Iswandi, Emri, Katia Chaterji
2025-08-15
This joint paper explores Turuk Lagai, a central ritual of the Mentawai people in West Sumatra, Indonesia, as a performative act that enacts and sustains their cosmological worldview. The study's objective is to understand how this ritual reflects belief and constitutes reality through embodied and relational practices. It recommends greater recognition of indigenous ritual not as static tradition but as an active and vital mode of world-making with implications for cultural preservation and ecological ethics.
Salawat Dulang: Minang Oral Tradition as Oral History of Islam
Asian MusicKatia Chaterji
2025-01-15
Salawat dulang is an oral tradition of the Minang peoples of West Sumatra (Indonesia) that simultaneously entertains an audience and reinforces knowledge about Islam (dakwah). Developed within the context of the Sufi Syattariyah brotherhood, salawat dulang reveals the influence of Islamic mysticism on the production and embodiment of Islamic knowledge in Sumatra through the performing arts. In this article, I apply perspectives and methods from oral history and performance ethnography to show how salawat dulang serves as an embodied practice that strengthens a practitioner’s position as both spiritual guide and oral historian for their community.
Striving for Interdisciplinarity: Collaborations Amongst Professionals and Across Institutions in Integrated Studies
Simpson Center for the HumanitiesKatia Chaterji
2021-05-19
When collaborating with an instructor from another discipline, the assumptions we bring to the table, so often entrenched in disciplinary frameworks and jargon, must be vocalized and interrogated and reconciled, not just tacitly accepted.
Perspectives from Two International Students at Shoreline Community College: An Interview with Maral Atayeva and Yara Musad (Class of 2021)
Simpson Center for the HumanitiesKatia Chaterji, Jessica Bachman
2021-06-16
In 2019, Shoreline Community College in Washington State became the first 2-year college in the United States to award international students a #youarewelcomehere scholarship. As part of the nationwide #youarewelcomehere campaign, which aims to combat xenophobia and affirm diversity on U.S. college campuses, the scholarship provides selected international students with a 50 percent tuition reduction for two years of study. As 2020-21 Collaborative Mellon Fellows for Reaching New Publics, we are invested in learning how higher education institutions can better meet the evolving needs of a diverse student body, and in identifying what institutional supports exist to meaningfully reduce barriers to academic success. The #youarewelcomehere scholarship seemed to us to be an excellent example.
