UNEAC Affiliated Fellow
| Dr Samita Sen
Department of History Calcutta University Alipur Campus 4th Floor, 1 Reformatory Street Calcutta 700 027 India Phone: 033-4398645 Email: doheu@giasc101.vsnl.net.in |
 |
UNEAC Affiliated Fellow
| Dr Samita Sen
Department of History Calcutta University Alipur Campus 4th Floor, 1 Reformatory Street Calcutta 700 027 India Phone: 033-4398645 Email: doheu@giasc101.vsnl.net.in |
|
Educated at Calcutta and Cambridge. Ph.D in history from Cambridge University in 1992. Elected Prize Fellow at Trinity in 1990 tenable till 1994. In 1994 joined Calcutta University as lecturer. Selected as Reader in 1999.
Monograph (based on the Ph.D thesis) published by Cambridge University Press in 1999. Won the Trevor Reese Prize in commonwealth history 1999-2000.
Active in the women's movement in Calcutta since 1983-84. Attended the UN conference at Beijing, 1995. Have participated in several policy-oriented research assignments from government of India, the UNIFEM and other aid organisations. Subjects: female labour and liberalisation; women and land rights in west Bengal’ women's access to legal remedies; violence and women.
Research interests and current research projects related to Asia:
Main research thrust: gender and labour in colonial South Asia. Publications: one monograph, a volume edited with Arjan de Haan and several papers in refereed journals and edited volumes.
Recently also written on the women's movement in India (history and contemporary context) gender historiography in South Asia and women's education in colonial and post-colonial India.
At present researching:
1. Towards a monograph on migration and women with special emphasis on Assam teagardens, but also examining indentured emigration to other parts of Asia.
2. Comparative research on patterns of family and labour in various East and South-East Asian countries.
Recent publications:
Women and Labour in Late Colonial India. The Bengal Jute Industry. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999.
A Case for Labour History. The Jute Industry in Eastern India. K. P. Bagchi, Calcutta, 1999 (edited with Arjan de Haan)
Motherhood and Mothercraft: Gender and Nationalism in Bengal. In Gender and History, 5, 2, Summer 1993.
Honour and Resistance: Gender, Community and Class in Bengal, 1920-40. In Sekhar Bandopadhyay, Abhijit Dasgupta and Willem van Schendel (ed.), Bengal: Communities, Development and States, Manohar publications, 1994.
Unsettling the Household: Act VI (of 1901) and the regulation of women migrants in colonial Bengal. In Shahid Amin and Marcel van der Linden (eds.) ‘Peripheral’ Labour? Studies in the history of partial proletarianisation. International Review of Social History, Supplement 4, 41, 1996.
Gendered Exclusion: Domesticity and Dependence in Bengal, International Review of Social History, 42, 1997.
Segregation and Solidarity: Women in Working Class Politics, Bombay and Calcutta, 1920-40, in R. Samaddar (ed.) Women in Asia, Calcutta, 1997.
Revised version. Segregation and Solidarity: Women Textile Workers in Calcutta and Bombay, 1920-1940, Bharati Ray (ed) volume on ‘Women in Politics’, K.P. Bagchi, Calcutta, 2000.
Interview with Vidya Munshi (8 and 16 July 1997), Journal of Women’s Studies, 2, 1, 1997.
Offences Against Marriage: Negotiating Custom in Colonial Bengal. Paper presented at the National Workshop on ‘Rethinking Indian Modernity: The Political Economy of Sexuality’, Madras, 1-3 August 1996. In Janaki Nair and Mary John (eds.), A Question of Silence? The Sexual Economies of Modern India, Kali for Women, New Delhi, 1999.
Class or Gender? Women and the Bengal Jute Industry. In Arjan de Haan and Samita Sen (eds.) A Case for Labour History: The Bengal Jute Industry, K.P. Bagchi, Calcutta, 1999.
At the margins: Women workers in the Bengal Jute Industry. In Jan Breman, Johnathan Parry and Karin Kapadia (eds.), The World of Indian Industrial Labour, Sage Publications, New Delhi, 1999. (Also in special edition of Contributions to Indian Sociology, 1999)
'Beyond the "Working Class": Women Workers in Indian Industries', South Asia, New Series, 22, 2, December 1999.
A Father’s Duty? State, Patriarchy and Women’s Education. In Sabyasachi Bhattacharya (ed.), Education and the Disprivileged. Nineteenth and Twentieth Century India. Orient Longman, New Delhi, 2002.