Department of History

Dr. Srimanjari

Associate Professor

Srimanjari’s research interest is in exploring the interconnections between history, archives and memory in the port-city of Mangalore. She worked on the social and political history of Bengal during World War II and the famine of 1943 for her doctoral thesis from the University of Delhi. Her post-doctoral work, with a grant of the British Academy Visiting Fellowship (2000) and a field trip to Bangladesh, resulted in a book, Through War and Famine (Orient Blackswan,2009). She has written educational material for the SCERT and IGNOU. She was awarded the Distinguished Teacher Award, University of Delhi in the year 2009.

Dr. Bharati Jagannathan is interested in the History of Religion in early India. She has worked on the Vaiṣṇava bhakti tradition of Tamil Nadu, and is currently engaged in looking at the Rāmāyaṇa from a feminist perspective. She has been teaching the History of Modern Europe for over two decades.

She conducts tree walks in Delhi where she both identifies trees and tells stories from mythology and popular folktales associated with particular trees. Most years, she conducts an informal writing workshop for students at Miranda House. Her monograph, Approaching the Divine: The Integration of Ālvār Bhakti in Śrīvaiṣṇavism, was published by Primus Books in 2015. Besides her academic publications, she has authored ten children’s books including a novel for young adults, A Week Along the Ganga, which was selected for the Tata Trust’s Parag Honour List 2019. In 2020, HarperCollins published her collection of short fiction, A Spoonful of Curds.

Madhu is an Associate Professor at the Department of History. She received her education from the Department of History, University of Delhi. She has been teaching a paper on the History of United States of America for over two decades. Her research interests include Gandhian and Ambedkar thoughts and works, American History, Visual Culture and Histories of the marginalized people. She has delivered lectures and presented papers at various International and National Conferences and Workshops.

She is actively involved with the Equal Opportunity Cell of the college which ensures  equitable and accessible spaces of learning to the students of marginalized communities.

Dr. Snigdha Singh is an Associate Professor in the Department of History, Miranda House. She has been awarded her PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her areas of interest include gender relations, especially as represented in inscriptions and visual sources, with a special focus on the early historic period. She has co-authored two books, ‘Beyond the Woman Question: Reconstructing Gendered Identities in Early India’, Delhi: Primus, 2018, and ‘Waters” of Western Rajasthan: Myth, Tradition, and Livelihood’ New Delhi: R.K.Books, 2020. Her book Inscribing Identities, Proclaiming Piety: Exploring Recording Practices in Early Historic India has been publshed from Primus, Delhi, 2022.

Sneh Jha specializes in Medieval Indian History and has taught undergraduate honours courses on Early Modern Europe and Environmental Issues in India apart from those on Medieval Indian Histories. She acquired her M.A and M. Phil degrees from the Department of History, University of Delhi. Her research focuses on the questions around languages and literary representations as cultural artefacts in medieval and early modern north India. For her M. Phil. she worked on Baburnama, a sixteenth century Turki text. Her doctoral work, in progress, is focused on Ramcaritmanas, a sixteenth century composition, as a source for reconstructing history of ideas, political cultures and knowledge formations in the early modern era.    

Radhika Chadha is Associate Professor in the Department of History, Miranda House. She received her PhD in History from Jawaharlal Nehru University. She has been Fellow, Fundaçao Oriente, Lisbon. Her academic interests include medieval Islamic empires, the history of early modern India, the visual culture of medieval and early modern South Asia and Gender. Her book, Merchants, Renegades, Padres: Portuguese Presence in Early Modern Bengal is forthcoming from Primus Books.

Dr. Kamini Kumari Das has a Master Degree in Modern Indian History from Vinoba Bhave University, Jharkhand Linking it to the Contemporary History of regional politics, she has her PhD from Southeast Asian Studies Division of Jawaharlal Nehru University. She was awarded Defence Research fellow in 2007, History Division, Ministry of Defence. 

Dr. Sunny Kumar is an Assistant Professor at Miranda House, University of Delhi. He is a historian of Modern South Asia and his areas of interest include the history of politics and political thought, legal history, Indian and global intellectual history, and history of political economy. He has published various articles on state and politics in colonial south Asia and is currently completing his first monograph. 

Dr Sushmita Banerjee is Assistant Professor, Department of History, Miranda House. She completed her PhD in Medieval Indian History from Department of History, University of Delhi. Her research interests include Persian literary culture, religion and politics of North India in the early modern period, sufism, history of Delhi Sultanate and Islam. She has presented papers in several international conferences in India as well as in the UK and Europe. Her publications include an article on the prosopographical analysis of the Akhbar al-Akhyar in the journal, Indian Economic and Social History Review and an essay on sufi-dyanstic families in pre-Mughal period in Oxford Research Enclyclopaedia of Asian History. 

Dr Vijay Kumar is an Assistant Professor of History at Miranda House. He completed his PhD from the History Department, the University of Delhi. His specialisation is in the history of modern India. His research work focuses on Dalit history, labour history and popular culture in modern north India. He has presented several research papers on various themes of Dalits at national and international conferences. He has contributed his research articles to the prestigious journal (Studies in People’s History) and edited volumes published by Sage and Bloomsbury Publishers. His forthcoming articles are about a Dalit Magistrate (from Modern Asian Studies) and Dalit Photo Archive in colonial UP (in an edited volume from Zubaan Publishers). Besides, he is currently working on his new research work, The Chaukidars and the British Raj in North India, c. 1780-1950 (a tentative title). 

Joeeta Pal  is a researcher of death practices with a PhD on the The Body in Death in Early Buddhism from the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her MPhil dissertation argued for multivalent death practices at sites of the Indus Valley Civilization through an analysis of skeletal remains in burials at Kalibangan and Lothal. She has been a fellow of the Trans Regional Academy of the Forum Transregionale Studien and the Max Weber Foundation on “India and the World: New Arcs of Knowledge”. She has both academic publications as well as for a more popular audience. Her outreach activities include a specially curated walk around the Harappa Gallery of the National Museum, New Delhi. She is a member of the Collective for Radical Death Studies.

Shahid Jamal specializes in Medieval and Early Modern Indian History. His long-term academic research is the Persian language with a particular focus on source criticism and Persian literary tradition. In his research, he is interesed in understanding discursive practices developed in Persian chroniclers in the late sixteeenth and early seventeenth-century in India. The textual tradition is a bland of Iranian and Indian literary idioms from a variety of Hindvi literature. The areas of  his general research include intellectual and cultural history of Islam, Muslim Societies, Sufi ideas and intellectual encounters between Christian and Muslim scholars at the Mughal court. 

Ratnpriya is a graduate from Miranda House and a researcher specialising in History of Ancient India from University of Delhi. Her PhD in progress is on ‘Social aspects of Death and Death Rituals : A study of Sanskrit Literature from 4th to 12th century C.E.’ Her research interests include gender relations and social history as represented in Sanskrit literature with a special focus on early historic period. She has also worked on representations of masculine behaviour in the Kāmaśāstrīya tradition focussing on the Kāmasūtra and the Anaṅgaraṅga in her M.Phil. She has various publications in different academic journals and has also contributed her articles as chapters in different books. 

Rohit Rai is Assistant Professor (Guest Faculty) in the History Department of Miranda House College. He has completed his PhD in Modern Indian History from the Centre for Historical Studies, JNU. His research interests revolve around the economic history of late 18th and early 19th century colonial India. His PhD thesis deals with the issue of private trading activities of the East India Company servants. He has tried to study the dynamic relations of the EIC and private traders (constantly swinging between cooperation and conflict) in the background of changing larger economic ideologies and interests of the British Empire in India.

Rohit Rai has taught papers like History of Modern China, History of Modern Japan, Delhi through the Ages etc. Currently he is teaching a paper titled 'The Making of Contemporary India' to B.A. Hons. History III Year batch.

Surbhi is a doctoral researcher at the Center for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her research focuses on popular reading practices in post independence India with a special accent on what have been dubbed 'women's magazines'. The work, in progress, is titled Gendering Print: A History of Magazines, Periodical Culture and Women’s Readership in Post Independence India, 1940s-1990s. Her wider areas of interest include gender studies, urban histories and popular cultures. Surbhi has been a junior research fellow at the Indian Council of Historical Research since 2021. 

Pankaj Kumar Singh is a doctoral researcher at the Centre for Historical Studies, JNU. His PhD research seeks to understand how detachment, valorization and quest for god intermingle to form different ascetic identities and institutions in early modern North India. He received his M.Phil. for the dissertation titled ‘Banaras and Changing meanings of its Urbanity (1556-1764) from CHS, JNU in 2018. He has been a Junior Research Fellow at the Indian Council of Historical Research from 2020-2022. His areas of interest include religious history, social history, and early modern Urban and economic history.