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 been working on 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 it 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 post-First-World-War changes in the British Empire and their implications for India. Focusing on the massive international controversy over a book by an American woman, it places the women’s movement in India at the center of post-war changes 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 a book project, tentatively entitled “Complete Political Independence: The Curious Genealogy of a Nationalist Indian Demand.” It 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. She is also co-editing a two-volume Cambridge History of the Modern Indian Subcontinent. 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 has been a member of the advisory boards of several journals, including the American Historical Review; Indian Economic and Social History Review; Journal of Women’s History; Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History; Past and Present; Gender and History; and History of the Present. She co-edits two book series, "Critical Perspectives on Empire"; with Cambridge University Press and “Critical Perspectives in South Asian History” with Bloomsbury Academic.

Sinha welcomes students in all fields of modern and contemporary South Asian history.