Rovel Sequeira

Dr. Rovel Sequeira is an LSA Collegiate Postdoctoral Fellow and incoming assistant professor in Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan. By training, He is a cultural historian and literary critic and works on the connected histories of formations of race, gender, and sexuality in modern South Asia and Europe.

Dr. Sequeira earned his PhD in English with a concentration in gender, sexuality, and women's studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests span colonial and postcolonial South Asian and imperial British cultural history, global feminist, queer, and trans studies, and the entangled histories of science and literature in the modern era. His work has been featured in or is forthcoming in interdisciplinary venues like GLQ, History of the Human Sciences, Modernism/modernity, Signs, and Museums, Sexuality, and Gender Activisms. In these forums, Dr. Sequeira has explored questions like what makes an HIV/AIDS clinic for sex workers billed as a sex museum thrive or fold in 21st century Mumbai, how prisons in Calcutta and the Andaman Island penal settlement became improvised sexological laboratories in turn-of-the-20th-century colonial India, and how contemporary Indian hijra-trans activists mobilize the literary genre of the autobiography and the social scientific genre of the ethnography to appropriate normative US-centric conceptions of gender rights as human rights.

Before joining the University of Michigan, Dr. Sequeira was a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow and held the Harry Ransom Center dissertation research fellowship at the University of Texas (Austin) as well as the Penfield dissertation research fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania.

His current book manuscript, The Nation and its Deviants: Global Sexology and the Racial Grammar of Sex in Colonial India, rethinks the historiography of modern sexual science (and its centrality to contemporary queer and trans studies) from the vantage point of colonial India. Working across archives in English, French, Hindi, and Marathi, Dr. Sequeira argues that India's encounter with the racist literary and scientific infrastructures of modern sexology engendered forms of "deviant" Indian sexual life that were not rooted in individualist understandings of sexuality as an interiorized inborn identity. While historians of sexuality have shown that sexuality was invented in Europe in the late nineteenth century by sexology, his work suggests that this particular "invention" was underpinned by liberal understandings of autonomous personhood. In colonial India, however, the confessional genres understood to produce the modern individual like the autobiography and the novel, and allied scientific genres like the case history and the questionnaire were seen as lacking due to Indians' so-called collectivist modes of thought, expression, and kinship. Consequently, an Indian sexological grammar emerged through contests over the alienness of these genres, producing indigenized conceptions of sex and sexuality that privileged exteriority as much as interiority as the hallmark of Indian sexual life.