Mou Banerjee

I received my Ph.D. from the Dept. of History at Harvard in 2018. My dissertation, “Questions of Faith: Christianity, Conversion and the Ideological Origins of Political Theology in Colonial India, 1813-1907” examines Christian evangelism in Bengal using archival evidence from sources such as vernacular Bengali broadsheets, pamphlets, court cases, probates and newspapers at multiple archives in the UK, India and Bangladesh. My book-project is an intellectual and political history of the creation of the Indian political self – a self that emerged through an often-oppositional relationship with evangelical Christianity and the apologetic debates arising out of such engagements.

My dissertation research was funded by the award of the 2013 SSRC-IDRF dissertation research fellowship which enabled me to conduct research at multiple archives in the UK, in India and in Bangladesh. I was a visiting scholar at the Centre for History and Economics at Magdalene College, Cambridge University in 2015-16. My dissertation committee members were Professors Sugata Bose (adviser), Emma Rothschild, David Armitage and Sunil Amrith. Prof. Ayesha Jalal of Tufts University acted as the external reader and examiner for the thesis. The dissertation received the Harold K. Gross award , which is granted annually by the faculty of the History Department at Harvard to the graduate student whose dissertation ‘gave greatest promise of a distinguished career of historical research.”

My research interests include the religion and politics in India, the history of gender, hunger and food politics, the history of borders, refugees and immigration during the first wave of decolonization in South Asia, and the history of foreign relations and diplomacy in the broader Indian Ocean arena.

Prior to my appointment at UW-Madison, I was was College fellow at the Department of South Asian Studies at Harvard in 2018 and Assistant Professor of History at Clemson University in 2018-19.