Durba Ghosh

Durba Ghosh is an Andrew Mellon Teaching Fellow in the department of Women's Studies at Wellesley College for the academic years 2001-2002, and 2002-2003. She currently teaches courses on women in South Asia and gender and colonialism.

Ghosh is a graduate of Wesleyan University (1989), where she majored in history and graduated with honors. She received a Masters' Degree in South Asian History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1994). She completed her Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley (2000), with concentration in South Asia, Modern Colonialism and Anthropology.

The Mellon Foundation, the American Association of University Women, the American Historical Association, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and the Five College Consortium have supported Professor Ghosh's research. She is fluent in Bengali, Hindi, and Urdu, the three major South Asian languages.

Ghosh's work focuses on changing nature of interracial conjugal and domestic relationships between indigenous women and European men in the first hundred years of British colonial rule in India. Her current work, entitled Colonial Companions: Wives, Workers, and Concubines of the British in India, 1760-1860, examines the emergence of racial and sexual anxieties over interracial sex and miscegenation through institutional terms as well as through the lived experience of men and women. She has been invited to present her research at the Harvard Center for the Humanities, the Center for European Studies at Harvard, the Five College Historians' Seminar, and the Middlebury Conference on Globalization.

Profile last updated: 3/02

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Last Modified: April 19, 2002