Gender and Women's Studies

Shefali Chandra

Shefali Chandra is an Assistant Professor of History and Gender & Women's Studies. She specializes in the history of South Asia, the history of women, gender and sexuality, and the cultural politics of language and gender. She is currently completing a manuscript entitled Domesticating English, in which she studies the intersection between the history of Indian English and the constitution of gender. Her teaching interests include courses on South Asian and Indian history, postcolonial and transnational feminisms, and non-west queer theories.

 

Education

2003                   PhD, University of Pennsylvania, History

1994                   BA, Mount Holyoke College, History, Anthropology (minor), cumme laude with High Honours

 

Academic Employment

2003- present              University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Assistant Professor, History and Gender & Women’s Studies

Selected Publications

‘The social life of English,’ book chapter in Neelam Hussain ed., The politics of language.  (Simorgh Feminist Publications, Lahore: 2005)

‘Engendering English: gender, sexuality and the language of desire in western India 1850-1940’ forthcoming in Gender and History

  Works in Progress

Foreign tongues in womanly places: language, gender and sexuality in western India 1850-1940. (Book manuscript)

‘Mimicry, masculinity and the mystique of Indian English: western India 1870-1900’

‘Marriage is unethical: an un-national queer perspective on the institution of marriage’ solicited for Tellis and Dasgupta eds., Immigrant Queers of Color and the Critique of the Hegemon

‘Whiteness on the margins of native patriarchy’

‘Queering Indian history’

Courses Taught

 

Loss, longing and absence: narratives of the partition of Pakistan and India; History of South Asia, 1500-present; The world, according to gender: women, gender and sexuality in transnational perspective; Feminism and postcoloniality; Invented Traditions, Contested Modernities: caste, language and religion; Modern South Asia, 1650-the present;

Graduate Courses

Imperialism and sexuality; En/gendering history: feminist, postcolonial, queer histories; Universal history and its discontents : world, global and postcolonial histories