Celebration of Durba Mitra's New Book, "Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought”

Please join us for a discussion of professor Durba Mitra's new book, Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought (Princeton University Press, 2020) in conversation with Sharon Marcus, Orlando Harriman Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and Lisa Lowe, Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies at Yale University.

Indian Sex Life explores how deviant female sexuality, particularly the concept of the prostitute, became foundational to the knowledge project of European scholars, British officials, and elite Indian intellectuals during the colonial period in India, and became a primary way to think and write about Indian society. Reviewer Douglas E. Haynes (Dartmouth) calls it "pathbreaking and original" and writes that "[i]t will compel global scholars of sexuality to question their existing assumptions." Sharon Marcus (Columbia) writes that "Mitra's deeply researched and ambitious study of how ideas about the prostitute shaped Indian social thought deserves to stand alongside the foundational work of Judith Walkowitz and Alain Corbin."

Durba Mitra is Assistant Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and Carol K. Pforzheimer Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. Her research and teaching focus on the history of sexuality, the history of science and epistemology, and gender and feminist thought in South Asia and the colonial and postcolonial world. 

This event is cosponsored by the Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard University.