Bilde av Moitra, Aheli
Photo: John McNicol
Bilde av Moitra, Aheli
Department of Archaeology, History, Religious Studies and Theology aheli.moitra@uit.no

Aheli Moitra


Doctoral research fellow in Religious Studies

Job description

I explore the presentations of indigeneities and religions in a newspaper called The Morung Express in Nagaland. The newspaper is located in the border regions between the nation-states of India and Myanmar, and home to the Naga people who often describe themselves as Indigenous Peoples, as well as Unrepresented Peoples, a Christian nation, Scheduled Tribes and others. I have been a journalist in India since 2003, and in Nagaland since 2011; at the UiT, my research focuses on the local and global potentials of news media in the South-South East Asian region. 

My work as a researcher involves reading physical newspaper archives, web and social media sites, interviewing journalists, editors, and other workers in the print news media in Nagaland, describing the data recovered from these and analyzing them. With a special focus on the news during the COVID-19 pandemic, this project is a fascinating exploration of the news media in Nagaland today.   

In other news: I was a visiting research fellow at the School of Divinity of the University of Edinburgh, Scotland (UK), from September 2021-February 2022. 

I have been trained as a research scholar at the Norwegian Research School in History (Oslo) and the Research School Religion-Values-Society (Oslo).   



Research interests

  • Theory & Method in the Study of Religion
  • History of Religious Studies
  • Indigeneity, religion, indigenous religion (s)
  • Indigenous media
  • Indigenous Peoples
  • Right to Self-determination
  • Morung
  • Christianity
  • Newspapers, journalism
  • Nagaland, India, Myanmar, Asia
  • COVID-19


Member of project