Swapna Banerjee

Swapna M. Banerjee’s research lies at the intersection of gender, class, race, and ethnicity in colonial South Asia and it focuses on women, servants, children, fathers, masculinity, domesticity, and family. Her book Men, Women and Domestics: Articulating Middle-Class Identity in Colonial Bengal employs the lens of employer-servant relationships to understand the construction of national identity in colonial Bengal. Her forthcoming new monograph, Fathers in a Motherland: Imagining Fatherhood in Colonial India interrogates the strong connection between fatherhood and masculinity. She is the co-editor of Mapping Women’s History in Colonial and Postcolonial India (Stree-Samya, forthcoming 2021). On a fellowship from the Australian Research Council, she is currently working on a collaborative research project, Ayahs and Amahs: Transcolonial Servants in Australia and Britain, 1780-1945 (https://ayahsandamahs.com). It historicizes the travelling Indian ayahs and Chinese amahs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her works appear in many edited volumes and journals. Her other projects include male domestics and intimate labor and a close biographical study of a contemporary domestic worker from India, Baby Halder.

Banerjee was named the Endowed Chair in Women's and Gender Studies (2016-18). She is affiliated with PURAI: Global Indigenous and Diaspora Research Studies at the University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia. Banerjee teaches courses on Gender, Race, Empire; Gender, Family, State; Women in Modern India; Modern South Asia; British imperialism, and Indian nationalism. She serves on the editorial board of the Routledge Studies in the Histories of Children and Youth and the Bloomsbury Press new series, “The Other in Empire.” She is a member of the Board of Directors of an UN-registered NGO, Women’s Founder’s Collective.