Durba Mitra

Last updated

Durba Mitra is an American historian and professor in the history of social and feminist studies departments at Harvard University. [1] Her work has contributed to the intersection of feminist theory and queer studies through her publications. Mitra's book Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought was published by Princeton University Press. [2] She was chosen for Carol K. Pforzheimer student fellowship as an assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute [2018]. At Harvard, she accepted the first full-time faculty member position for the Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. [3]

Contents

Early life

Mitra's mother played an important role in Mitra's life. [3] Her mother was an immigrant from India in the 1980s, who raised Mitra and her sibling as a single mother while working and pursuing a PhD in Statistics. [4] In an interview for Havard Magazine, Mitra highlights her mother's independence and commitment to her cultural identity to her cultural identity, emphasizing how she defied stereotypes by wearing a sari daily in Fargo during the 1980s. Contrary to expectations of familial constraint on South Asian immigrants, Mitra's mother encouraged her to explore diverse possibilities. This led Mitra to view life from a different perspective compared to her peers in North Dakota.

Education and career

As an undergraduate student, Mitra initially pursued a pre-med path, aiming for medical school and a career in global public health. Her passion for the social and historical aspects surrounding medicine rather than its practice which led her to choose Laney Graduate School for its interdisciplinary programs and excellent Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program. [5]

In her doctoral research, she delved back into her roots, exploring the history of gender and sexuality in colonial India. She completed her PhD in 2013, also earning her a certificate in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. [2] She investigated how perceptions of women's sexuality, particularly notions of deviance, influenced discussions on law, science, and societal reform during British colonial rule. [6]

Mitra then served as an Assistant Professor of History at Fordham University in New York City. Additionally, she's a 2015–16 Mellon Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Humanities Forum. Currently, she's challenging the norms at Harvard University as the first full-time faculty member for the Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. [3]

Work

In Sex and The New Science of Society in Colonial India , she investigates how the figure of the sexually deviant woman, often depicted as the prostitute, was central in the making of a new sociological imagination in eastern India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, according to the University of Michigan. [7]

Her article titled "Testing Chastity, Evidencing Rape: Impact of Medical Jurisprudence on Rape Adjudication in India" was published in the Economic and Political Weekly. Fordham University suggests that the article delves into the influence of forensic medicine on rape cases during colonial and postcolonial India. [8]

Her talk at the end of October 2023 at the Poorvu Gallery at the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Third World Feminism and the Crisis of Authoritarianism delves into the dynamic landscape of Third World feminisms during the 1970s and 1980s. [9] It examines how feminists responded to the disillusionment with nationalist movements and the rise of neocolonial governments by reshaping knowledge production. [10] By critiquing postcolonial inequality and rising authoritarianism, they envisioned more equitable futures, marking a significant shift in global feminist thought. [7]

Awards

Publications

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Harvard Radcliffe Institute</span> Division of Harvard University

The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, also known as the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, is an institute of Harvard University that fosters interdisciplinary research across the humanities, sciences, social sciences, arts, and professions. It came into being in 1999 as the successor institution to the former Radcliffe College, originally a women's college connected with Harvard.

Lois Wendland Banner is an American author and emeritus professor of history at the University of Southern California. She is one of the earliest academics to focus on women's history in the United States. Her work includes biographies of Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Marilyn Monroe and Greta Garbo as well as the textbook Women in Modern America: A Brief History.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Afsaneh Najmabadi</span> Iranian-American historian and gender theorist

Afsaneh Najmabadi is an Iranian-born American historian, gender theorist, archivist, and educator. She is the Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University.

Cindi Katz, a geographer, is Professor in Environmental Psychology, Earth and Environmental Sciences, American Studies, and Women's Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her work concerns social reproduction and the production of space, place and nature; children and the environment; the consequences of global economic restructuring for everyday life; the privatization of the public environment, the intertwining of memory and history in the geographical imagination, and the intertwined spatialities of homeland and home-based security. She is known for her work on social reproduction and everyday life, research on children's geographies, her intervention on "minor theory", and the notion of counter-topography, which is a means of recognizing the historical and geographical specificities of particular places while inferring their analytic connections to specific material social practices.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lisa Lowe</span> U.S. professor

Lisa Lowe is Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies at Yale University, and an affiliate faculty in the programs in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Prior to Yale, she taught at the University of California, San Diego, and Tufts University. She began as a scholar of French and comparative literature, and since then her work has focused on the cultural politics of colonialism, immigration, and globalization. She is known especially for scholarship on French, British, and United States colonialisms, Asian migration and Asian American studies, race and liberalism, and comparative empires.

Antoinette M. Burton is an American historian, and Professor of History and Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. On November 23, 2015, Burton was named Chair of the University of Illinois' search for a permanent Chancellor after the resignation of Phyllis Wise.

Françoise Lionnet serves as acting chair of the Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University, where she is professor of Romance languages and literatures, comparative literature, and African and African American studies. She is distinguished research professor of comparative literature and French and Francophone studies at UCLA, and a research associate of the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. She served as director of the African Studies Center and Program Co-Director of UCLA's Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities: Cultures in Transnational Perspective.

Nancy Joan Hirschmann is an American political scientist. She is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor in American Social Thought at the University of Pennsylvania where she specializes in the history of political thought, analytical philosophy, feminist theory, disability theory, and the intersection of political theory and public policy.

Jigna Desai is a Professor in the Department of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies and Asian American Studies, currently at the University of Minnesota. She is a writer, teacher, mentor, artist, and engaged researcher whose scholarship crosses many fields of study including transnational feminism, Asian American Studies, queer studies, postcolonial feminism, critical disability studies, critical youth studies, feminist media studies, critical ethnic studies, and critical university studies. She has also written extensively on issues of racial and gender disparities and social justice.

Mari Ruti was a Finnish-Canadian philosopher. She had served as Distinguished Professor of Critical Theory and of Gender and Sexuality Studies on the graduate faculty at the University of Toronto in Toronto, Canada, and as an Undergraduate Instructor at their Mississauga campus. She was an interdisciplinary scholar within the theoretical humanities working at the intersection of contemporary theory, continental philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, cultural studies, trauma theory, posthumanist ethics, gender, and sexuality studies.

In 2004, Jane Bennett co-edited Jacketed Women: Qualitative Research Methodologies on Sexualities and Gender in Africa with Charmaine Pereira. Bennett has a BA from the University of Natal, MPhil and EdD from Columbia University. She has an academic background in linguistics, literature, sociology, and feminist theory.

Susan Zaeske is Professor of Rhetoric and Public Culture in the Department of Communication Arts and Arts and was formerly Associate Dean for Arts and Humanities in the College of Letters & Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Mark D. Jordan is a scholar of Christian theology, European philosophy, and gender studies. He is currently the Richard Reinhold Niebuhr Research Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School and Professor of the Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Imani Perry</span> American interdisciplinary scholar (born 1972)

Imani Perry is an American interdisciplinary scholar of race, law, literature, and African American culture. She is currently the Henry A. Morss, Jr. and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, a Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and a columnist for The Atlantic. Perry won the 2022 National Book Award for Nonfiction for South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation. In October 2023, she was named a MacArthur Fellow.

Banu Subramaniam is a professor of women, gender and sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Originally trained as a plant evolutionary biologist, she writes about social and cultural aspects of science as they relate to experimental biology. She advocates for activist science that creates knowledge about the natural world while being aware of its embeddedness in society and culture. She co-edited Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties (2005) and Feminist Science Studies: A New Generation (2001). Her book Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity (2014) was chosen as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title in 2015 and won the Society for Social Studies of Science Ludwik Fleck Prize for science and technology studies in 2016. Her most recent book, Holy Science: The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism (2019), won the Michelle Kendrick Prize for the best book from the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts in 2020.

Elizabeth A. Wilson is a Samuel Candler Dobbs professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Emory University. She is a scholar of feminist science studies, and her work brings together psychoanalytic theory, affect theory, feminist and queer theory, and neurobiology. She is the author of Neural Geographies: Feminism and the Microstructure of Cognition (1998), Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body (2004), Affect and Artificial Intelligence (2010), and Gut Feminism (2015).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jacqueline Wernimont</span> American academic

Jacqueline D. Wernimont is an American academic who is the Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities and Social Engagement at Dartmouth College. Her first book, Numbered Lives Life and Death in Quantum Media, was released by MIT Press in January 2019. It is the first book to map connections in feminist media history. She is the founding Director of Human Security Collaborator, a collaboration of interdisciplinary academics working on digital civil rights and big data.

Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers is an American historian. She is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. She is an expert in African-American history, the history of American slavery, and women's and gender history.

Jyoti Puri is Hazel Dick Leonard Chair and Professor of Sociology at Simmons University. She is a leading feminist sociologist who advocates for transnational and postcolonial approaches to the study of gender, sexuality, state, nationalism, and death and migration. She has published three books, and her most recent book, Sexual States: Governance and the Struggle Against the Antisodomy Law in India’s Present received the Distinguished Book Award from the Sociology of Sexualities Section of the American Sociological Association. She has delivered keynote lectures and given talks across a wide range of universities in North America and Europe.

Elizabeth Freeman was an English professor at the University of California, Davis, and before that Sarah Lawrence College. Freeman specialized in American literature and gender/sexuality/queer studies. She served as Associate Dean of the Faculty for Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Davis.

References

  1. ↑ "Durba Mitra". Wolf Humanities Center. 2015-03-12. Retrieved 2024-05-16.
  2. 1 2 "Social Theory from the Global South: In Conversation with Durba Mitra, Andrew Liu, Anupama Rao". Borderlines. 2021-06-18. Retrieved 2024-05-30.
  3. 1 2 3 "Challenging the Norms: Durba Mitra Comes to Harvard | Magazine | The Harvard Crimson". www.thecrimson.com. Retrieved 2024-05-16.
  4. ↑ mbolot@harvardmag.com (2018-09-07). "Durba Mitra studies gender in South Asia | Harvard Magazine". www.harvardmagazine.com. Retrieved 2024-05-16.
  5. ↑ "Tools for Success | Emory University | Atlanta GA". gs.emory.edu. Retrieved 2024-05-16.
  6. ↑ "WGS Hires First Full-Time Professor | News | The Harvard Crimson". www.thecrimson.com. Retrieved 2024-05-16.
  7. 1 2 3 "All Events | U-M LSA Women's and Gender Studies". lsa.umich.edu. Retrieved 2024-05-16.
  8. ↑ "Durba Mitra | Fordham History" . Retrieved 2024-05-30.
  9. ↑ "Durba Mitra Curates Radcliffe Exhibit". wgs.fas.harvard.edu. Retrieved 2024-05-30.
  10. ↑ "Durba Mitra (And Her New Book) Featured in the Harvard Gazette". wgs.fas.harvard.edu. Retrieved 2024-05-30.
  11. ↑ "Durba Mitra". wgs.fas.harvard.edu. Retrieved 2024-05-16.
  12. ↑ "Indian Sex Life". press.princeton.edu. January 7, 2020. Retrieved 2024-05-16.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.