Mrinalini Sinha

Mrinalini Sinha is a historian of Modern South Asia and of the British Empire. She has written on various aspects of the political history of colonial India, with a focus on anti-colonialism, gender, and transnational approaches. She has recently become interested in the different forms of political imaginings, beyond the nation-state, that animated anti-colonial thought in India at least until the interwar period.

Her first book Colonial Masculinity: The Manly Englishman and the Effeminate Bengali sought to combine British and Indian history, and brought gender analysis to bear on questions of “high politics,” to understand a critical moment in the relationship between colonialism and nationalism in India. Her subsequent book, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire, explores the post-First-World-War changes in the British Empire, especially their implications in India. The book received the Albion Book Prize, awarded annually by the North American Conference on British Studies and the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize (2007) awarded annually by the American Historical Association. She has also published widely in journals and in edited collections. She has been a recipient of several fellowships, including from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Institute of Indian Studies, and the American Philosophical Society.

She is currently working on two book projects. One, “Complete Political Independence: The Curious Genealogy of a Nationalist Indian Demand,” examines how Indian claims to rights as natural-born British subjects in the British Empire as a whole were eventually substituted by demands for the rights of Indians in the arguably more limited, and limiting polity: the nation-state. The other is a study of M. K. Gandhi’s politics that eschews “internalist” accounts of his unique perspective on nationalism and attempts to place his views in relation to the political context of his times.

She has served as president of the Association for Asian Studies (2014-15); on the Council of the American Historical Association (2005- 2007); and on the executive board founding the Society for Advancing the History of South Asia (2008-2012). She serves on the advisory boards of several journals and is involved as co-editor for the book series, "Critical Perspectives on Empire," with Cambridge University Press and as member of the editorial board for the book series, "South Asia in Motion," with Stanford University Press.

Sinha welcomes students in all fields of modern and contemporary South Asian history, including in her own areas of research.

Selected Publications:

“Premonitions of the Past,” Journal of Asian Studies 74: 4 (Nov 2015)

"Totaram Sanadhya's Fiji Mein Mere Ekkis Varsh: A History of Empire and Nation in a Minor Key," inTen Books That Shaped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons, edited by Isabel Hofmeyr & A. Burton (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,  2014)

“Is ‘Region’ Still Good to Think?” Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East  33: 3 (2013)

“Whatever Happened to the Third British Empire? Empire, Nation, Redux” in Writing Imperial Histories, edited byAndrew Thompson (Manchester, UK: Manchester Univ. Press, 2013)

“A Global Perspective on Gender: What’s South Asia Got to do with it?” in South Asian Feminisms, edited by Ania Loomba & Ritty A. Lukose (Duke University Press, 2012)

"Historically Speaking: Gender and Citizenship in Colonial India," in The Question of Gender, edited by Judith Butler and Elizabeth Weed (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011)

"The Strange Death of an Imperial Ideal: The Case of Civis Britannicus" in Modern Makeovers: Handbook of Modernity in South Asia, edited by Saurabh Dube (Oxford University Press, 2011)

Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006) 

Colonial Masculinity: The 'manly Englishman' and the 'effeminate Bengali' in the late nineteenth century (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1995)

Affiliation(s)

• Center for South Asian Studies
• Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History
• English Language and Literature
• Women's Studies

Field(s) of Study

• South Asia
• Colonialism and Imperialism
• World and Global
• Women's Studies