Join Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program
for our Faculty Work Luncheon with
Durba Ghosh, Professor of History

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 17
12PM-1PM
190 Rockefeller Hall

My teaching and research focus on the history of British colonialism on the Indian subcontinent. I am the author of two books, and more than a dozen journal articles and book chapters; in one way or another, they all focus on the relationship between colonial agents, officials, and elites and those who were colonized. Since I arrived at Cornell in 2005, I have taught courses on modern South Asia, the British empire, gender, and colonialism. In Fall 2021, I will be teaching a new course on the Afterlives of 9/11 to think about the twentieth anniversary of this global historical event.

My recent book, Gentlemanly Terrorists, focuses on an underground radical political movement in early and mid-twentieth century India and the ways in which political violence against the British colonial state became an important, but historically underemphasized, form of protest. While Gandhi's nonviolent protest movements are often seen to be the hallmark of anticolonial protest, the book follows how the colonial state invested in security and emergency legislation to contain what they felt was an active terrorist threat. In the process of writing this book, I have become fascinated with the ways that political violence has become a central part of popular historical narratives.

My next project focuses on commemorations of freedom fighters, and the ways in which public monuments and statues to mark India's independence struggle have become a part of India's political landscape. As a part of that project, I am part of the new collaboration group "Unsettled Monuments, Unstable Heritage," funded by the Radical Collaborations initiative in the humanities.

I have written two short essays on the removal of statues in the last year: One in collaboration with Kelly King-O'Brien on the relationship between colonial and confederate statues. A more recent essay focuses on statues of Cecil Rhodes that were not installed.

At Cornell, I have been involved with the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program, the South Asia Program, the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, the Society for the Humanities, the Institute for Social Sciences, the CIVIC initiative that emerged out of the Radical Collaborations projects. I currently serve on the Cornell University Press faculty board and am a member of the University Faculty Committee. Further afield, I have served on program and prize committees for the American Historical Association, American Institute of Indian Studies, Association of Asian Studies, Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, and North American Conference on British Studies.

Currently I am the inaugural director of a new program based in the College of Arts and Sciences, the Humanities Scholars Program.

Attendees are kindly requested to read "Revisiting Sex and the Family" in advance of the workshop.

RSVP for the workshop here.