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Biography
Uditi Sen grew up in Calcutta and was educated in Presidency University and Jawaharlal Nehru University in India, before winning the prestigious Commonwealth and Charles Wallace Scholarships, which allowed her to pursue a PhD in History at the University of Cambridge. She was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute (2010-11) in Florence, Italy and has taught at various institutions, including the London School of Economics and Political Science and Hampshire College in USA. In 2018, she joined the University of Nottingham as the Assistant Director of Liberal Arts.
Expertise Summary
I am a historian of modern and contemporary India, with particular interest in themes of migration, gender, memory and identity. My first book, Citizen Refugee, extensively researched the impact of the partition of India, focusing particularly on the governance of refugees. My work is influenced by postcolonial theory, the Subaltern Studies school and feminist scholars. I am fluent in Bengali and Hindi, which has enabled me to conduct oral history research into the experiences of marginalised groups of refugees. I use refugee reminiscences to understand how refugees negotiate policies and how memory impacts identity formation.
I am broadly interested in post-colonial history of India and how marginalised sections of society- namely, women, depressed castes and tribes - negotiate complex processes of national development. I have completed a collaborative research project that explores the myriad roles played by women - as volunteers, organisers, bureaucrats, politicians, writers and citizens - in shaping the emerging ideologies and structures of independent India. This project's findings are available as a special section, entitled A Country of Her Making in the Journal of South Asian Studies. At present, I am working on a British Academy funded project, entitled "Tribal Welfare and Island Development: Historicising Settler-Tribal conflict in the Andaman Islands". This project builds upon my previous research into refugee resettlement in the Andaman Islands - a remote frontier Islands chain - to explore how modern governance has displaced and endangered the indigenous community of the Jarawas.