Rovel Sequeira

Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies

rovelsqr@umich.edu

Education/Degree:

Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 2022
M.A., St. Stephen's College, University of Delhi, 2014
B.A. (Hons.), St. Xavier's College, University of Mumbai, 2012

About

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan. I work on the connected histories of formations of sexuality, gender, race, and empire in modern India as a historian of epistemology and a cultural and literary critic. My research interests span colonial and postcolonial South Asian and imperial British cultural and literary history, global feminist, queer, and trans studies, and the entangled epistemologies of science and literature in the modern era.

My work has been featured in or is forthcoming in interdisciplinary venues like GLQ, History of the Human Sciences, Modernism/modernity, Signs, Museums, Sexuality, and Gender Activisms and the Oxford Handbook of LGBTQ History. In these forums, I have 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 U.S.-centric conceptions of gender rights as human rights. Before joining the University of Michigan as an LSA Collegiate Fellow, I was a Mellon/ACLS Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, where I completed my PhD in English and a graduate certificate in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies.

My current book manuscript, The Empire 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, I argue 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, but in idioms of racial excess.

Affiliations