Shuvatri Dasgupta

My doctoral dissertation is tentatively titled: "A History of Conjugality: On Patriarchy, Caste, and Capital, in the British Empire c.1872-1947." It deals with the political economy of Hindu marriage by looking at it through the intersectional lens of global capital and patriarchy--in an attempt to argue that the liminality of the institution of marriage between private and public spheres, male and female lifeworlds, and legal and customary practices, has obfuscated its centrality in socio-political and economic histories of empires. Through this historically contextualised investigation of Hindu marriage, my dissertation seeks to explore the larger shared abstract vocabularies within diverse forms of heteronormative union. By using the lens of Social Reproduction Theory (and Marxist-feminist scholarship in general)  it attempts to establish the importance of uncovering these histories of marriage not just as legal or gender histories, but as the origin point of private property ownership and capitalist exploitation, in human history. 

My general research interests include global history, gender history, intellectual history and political thought, histories of empire, histories of capitalism, Marxist and Marxist-feminist theory, and critical theory in general.

HAP seminar on 'Empire' in Lent Term, 2020.

HAP lecture on 'Empire', in Lent Term 2021. 

Supervision Paper 23 'World History Since 1914'. 

Paper titled ‘Caught in the Middle (east): Entangling and revisualising geographies’ in Columbia University’s workshop ‘South South Intellectual Histories’, October 2016. Conference website: http://cih.columbia.edu/events/south-south/



Paper titled ‘Globalising existence(​astitva​): Transtemporal Concept Histories of the ​Baidya​ Community in Colonial Bengal’ in the Annual Graduate Approaches to Global History Workshop, Pembroke College, University of Oxford, May 2018.



Paper titled ‘Beyond Ethics and Epics: Rethinking the Mahabharatas through the Politics of Religion, Caste and Gender’ in a workshop titled ‘Mahabharatas in Global Intellectual History’ in LMU Munich, November, 2018.

Conference report: https://jhiblog.org/2019/07/01/the-mahabharata-in-modern-intellectual-history-perspectives-from-south-asia-europe-and-east-asia/



Paper titled ‘From Statistical Surveys to Ethnographic and Anthropological Exercises: Caste in the Colonial Census, c.1870-1911’ in Graduate Research Day, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, April 2019.



Paper titled '‘In what Language does the Subaltern Speak? Juxtaposing caste and gender in colonial South Asia, c.1870-1930’ in Gender and Sexuality Graduate History Conference, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, May 2019.



Paper titled ‘Rethinking Privilege: Juxtaposing Caste, Class, and Gender in Colonial Bengal, c.1872-1930’, in St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata for ‘International Conference on Caste Questions in West Bengal and Bangladesh’, October 2019.