Department Faculty

“I am a historian of colonial India and of the British Empire. I am interested most broadly in the history of empire, as it played out through multiple relations of power, in colonial India. My research has spanned the history of the British-Indian connection from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. My first book focused on the construction of a politics of 'colonial masculinity': a multiply faceted ideological mechanism through which the British responded to the political challenge from an educated urban middle-class in India in the late nineteenth century. I followed this with a study of the political transformations of the British-Indian connection in the post-First World-War period as they were mediated by the coalescence in the public and political realms in late colonial India of a new collective identity for women. My current book project focuses on the trajectory of the concept of imperial citizenship, the demand for the rights of Indians as British subjects, in colonial India. My interest lies in the alternative forms of political community and of political solidarity, beyond the nation-state, that animated anti-colonial politics at least until the interwar period in India. I am currently also co-editing with Catherine Hall and Kathleen Wilson a new book series for Cambridge University Press entitled "Critical Perspectives on Empire". My research as well as my teaching has been marked by a focus on the impact of the connections and interactions that have shaped our modern world. ”