2023-24 Graduate Student Research Fellow
About
Sangita Saha is a PhD candidate in the joint History and Women’s & Gender Studies Program. Her project, titled “Emerging as the ‘Modern’ Consumer: Middle-Class Bengali Women, Consumption and the Market in Colonial Bengal,” focuses on women’s consumption of everyday items such as books, beauty products, food items and clothing from the nineteenth century. She explores how the gendered expectations and practices of consumption allowed the Bengali woman to be in a constant, interactive and dynamic relationship with the ongoing processes of the market in Bengal. Sangita won the 2023 Dorothy McGuigan Prize awarded to the best essay on women and gender written at the University of Michigan.
During the fellowship period, Sangita will continue her dissertation work, and draft the last chapter on Bengali women’s consumption of clothes and shoes in the colonial period, by using the vernacular archive she built around her project. She will also substantially polish the earlier chapters of the dissertation.
