CAMBRIDGE, MA– Durba Mitra, who specializes in the social and intellectual histories of modern South Asia, histories of sexuality and feminist science studies, will join Harvard University’s Center for Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality (WSG).
WGS announced at its website that Durba Mitra will join as Assistant Professor of the Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality starting in fall 2017. Mitra’s arrival marks a milestone for the program as she will be the first new hire with an appointment solely in WGS.
During the 2017-2018 academic year, she will teach three undergraduate seminars in WGS: the history foundation course (1200) in the fall and the theory foundation course (1210) and one elective in the spring. During her first three years at Harvard, she will also be the Carol K. Pforzheimer Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute, making her part of a multidisciplinary cohort of promising new faculty who receive fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute during their first years at Harvard.
Mitra specializes in the social and intellectual histories of modern South Asia, histories of sexuality, feminist science studies, the history of women and gender, and comparative histories of marginality and difference. Her current book project investigates how the concept of the sexually deviant woman, often depicted as the prostitute, was central in the making of a new sociological imagination in India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Mitra joins WSG from Fordham University, where she teaches in the Department of History and Women’s Studies. She has held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania and at Bowdoin College, and was a Fulbright-Nehru Scholar to India. She received her Ph.D. from Emory University.
