Kavita Gawrinauth is a Ph.D. student in History at New York University. She holds an M.A. in Adolescent Education and a B.A. in History from Adelphi University. Her research focuses on Indo-Guyanese migration, religion, identity, and diaspora, with particular attention to how communities reconstruct religious and cultural life across empire, postcolonial Guyana, and immigrant New York.
As the daughter of Indo-Guyanese immigrants, her work is shaped by both scholarly inquiry and lived history. A musician raised in Hindu devotional traditions, she grew up playing the harmonium and singing bhajans (devotional songs), experiences that deeply inform her interest in prayer, sound, memory, and religious belonging.
Her research asks what prayer, devotion, and sacred community meant for those who journeyed from India to British Guiana and later from Guyana to New York City. How did migrants preserve, adapt, or reimagine their identities, faith, and religious practices across displacement?
She is especially interested in mandirs, devotional music, oral memory, family history, and community archives as sites where Indo-Guyanese people preserve, reinterpret, and transmit their past. Her broader interests include Caribbean history, South Asian diaspora, Asian American history, oral history, religious studies, public humanities, and transnational migration.