Neha received her B.A. (History) from the University of Delhi, M.A. (Modern History) from Jawaharlal Nehru University, and M.Sc. in Modern South Asian Studies from the University of Oxford. In her time at Oxford, she worked on Hindu Nationalism through an analysis of the contours of everyday life in Northern India. Her thesis was titled "Organising the Everyday: Understanding Hindu Nationalism through the Life of RSS Swayamsevaks”. The thesis looked at how the RSS intervenes in the everyday life of its members and contracts not only a larger community in this everyday life but also gives the everyday-dimension a programme through which its workers have been able to mobilise North Indian society. Ultimately, her research was an attempt to find answers to what makes Hindu Nationalism gain traction in North Indian society despite its non-emancipatory outlook. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Faculty of History. The thesis is titled ‘The Everyday Mobilisation of the RSS (1973-92)’. Her current supervisor is Prof Samita Sen in the Faculty of History.

Email: nc526@cam.ac.uk

I completed my MPhil in Modern South Asian History at the University of Cambridge in 2017. Previously, I have been a visiting scholar at the Centre of Islamic Studies at Cambridge (2015) on a research grant funded by the INLAKS Shivdasani Foundation.

Research Interests: my doctoral thesis focuses on the experiences of internally displaced Muslim stayers-on in Communist Calcutta, 1977-2011. The primary objective of my thesis is to counter narratives that describe Muslim neighbourhoods as culturally homogenous, deteriorating spaces, lacking economic vitality, perennially entrenched in a state of intractable socio-economic deprivation. The historiography on Muslim ghettos in West Bengal has tended to rely on symbolic and spatialized binaries, such as, Hindu-Muslim, insider-outsider, safe-unsafe, periphery-centre, rural-urban, and city-borderland. These categorizations have produced analytical blind-spots that describe Muslim neighbourhoods predominantly through tropes of exclusion, marginalisation, and victimisation. Such a reading puts forward a rather static and orthodox understanding of Muslim ghettoisation. It is not attentive to the ways in which Muslim communities have been self-sustaining in the face of state antipathy by relying on locally embedded networks within and beyond their localities. The overgeneralizing accounts of Muslim ghettoisation in post-partition West Bengal precludes the possibility of understanding Muslim neighbourhoods as vibrant spaces of social and economic enterprise, rooted in thriving commercial corridors that link these localities to their borderlands and beyond. My thesis examines the social histories and genealogies of Calcutta’s ‘Muslim ghettos’; and the diverse practices of production and consumption within Muslim communities, with a specific focus on the labour histories of Muslim dockworkers and darzis (tailoring communities) in Calcutta. My research interests lie primarily in migration, gender, and labour history.

Email: hc424@cam.ac.uk

I am a PhD candidate in the Faculty of History funded by a Newnham College and Vice-Chancellor Studentship. I completed my BA in English and History (2013) and MA in Contemporary History and International Politics (2016) at the University of York. My doctoral thesis examines the intersections of racial politics, gender and beauty in late colonial and immediate post-independence India (1880-1960). My project contextualises and historicises contemporary studies of colourism and skin-lightening by discussing how colonial ideas about race, identity and beauty consumption informed and affected attitudes that have endured into the post-colonial period. The project examines how British colonial constructions of race, femininity, and aesthetics worked in dialogue with ideas about caste, Indian cultural norms and ideals of femininity and beauty to influence quotidian practices and consumption of Indian women, and the ways in which practices were utilised to secure forms of social power. It does this by placing these questions into the context of colonial modernities, and interrogating patterns of consumption, self-fashioning and textual and material cultures.

Sabrina is a PhD candidate studying Visual Culture at the Photographic History Research Centre at De Montfort University. She is based at Cambridge University Library, where her work looks at the use of visual materials in education during the British colonial-era.

Originally from Italy, Sabrina holds a BA in Cultural Heritage from University of Trento and a MA in Photographic History and Practice from De Montfort University. She has also worked as assistant curator in various photographic exhibitions, while working on a photographic research project at The Italian Historical War Museum.

In broader terms, she is interested in colonial photographic history, specifically as it pertains to the use of photography in propaganda.

My thesis explores ideas on indigeneity that have developed in the twentieth century and in contemporary indigenous rights movements through a comparison of Adivasi, Native American and Australian Aboriginal literatures. I was part of the MPhil class of 2014-2015 at the Centre for South Asian Studies during which I researched on song cultures of Adivasi movements in Odisha with the guidance of my supervisor Dr David Washbrook and valuable insights from Prof. Joya Chatterji. The Centre’s library and collections continue to be vital resources for my work. Barbara, Rachel and Kevin make the Centre the vibrant and welcoming space that it is and are always willing to help. Moreover, the Centre's quiet and spacious library with a great view and an abundance of natural light remains my preferred study space.

Tom is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of History and a Gonville/Bauer Student at Caius College. Before starting his PhD, Tom completed his MPhil at the Centre of South Asian Studies, and his bachelor’s degree at the University of Sheffield. His doctoral work, which is supervised by Sujit Sivasundaram, focuses on the scientific study and medicalisation of speech in British India. It uses medical records to interrogate how and why speech variation was pathologised in colonial medicine, and it closely examines the role of traditional medicine in that process. It also explores how the medicalised speech of Indian subjects contributed to a greater understanding of the voice in other parts of the world. Moreover, and by turning its subject matter on its head, the thesis questions how scientists and medical professionals used speech in their own practice to develop distinctive oral cultures of colonial knowledge and therapeutics.

Meeraal holds a BA in History and Politics from Mount Holyoke College and an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies from Cambridge. Her research focuses on memorialisation practices in South Asia.