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, a Professor in the Department of History, Miranda House, holds a PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her research interest centres around gender relations, particularly as represented in inscriptions and visual sources during the early historic period. She has co-authored three books, ‘Beyond the Woman Question: Reconstructing Gendered Identities in Early India’, (Delhi: Primus, 2018), ‘Waters” of Western Rajasthan: Myth, Tradition, and Livelihood’ (New Delhi: R.K.Books, 2020) and 'Of Thieves and Therīs, Potters and Pativratās: Essays on Early Indian Social History for Kumkum Roy'',(Delhi: Primus, 2023).Her monograph, Inscribing Identities, Proclaiming Piety: Exploring Recording Practices in Early Historic India, published by Primus in 2022, received the prestigious Braj Dev Prasad Memorial Prize for the Best Book in Ancient India at the Indian History Congress in December 2023, held in Warangal.

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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 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 Persian literati and sufism in the journal South Asia, another article on prosopographical analysis of the Akhbar al-Akhyar in the journal, Indian Economic and Social History Review  and an essay on sufi-dynastic families in pre-Mughal period in Oxford Research Enclyclopaedia of Asian History. 

Dr Vijay Kumar is an Assistant Professor in the History Department 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 Dalit history at national and international conferences. He has contributed his research articles to prestigious journals (Modern Asian Studies and Studies in People’s History) and edited volumes published by Sage and Bloomsbury Publishers. His forthcoming article is about a Dalit Magistrate and Dalit Photo Archive in colonial UP (in an edited volume from Zubaan Publishers). Besides, he is currently working on his new research project, The Chaukidars and the British Raj in North India, c. 1780-1950 (a tentative title). He is a member of International Academic Associations like the British Association for South Asian Studies (London) and the European Association for South Asian Studies (Bonn). 

Rashi Raman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Miranda House, University of Delhi. Her area of specialization is Modern Environmental History with a focus on History of Kosi River, shift in its course, floods, famine, movements and migrations, space creation and urbanization. She obtained her B.A., M.A., and M.Phil. from University of Delhi, and her M.Phil. dissertation delves into the Ecology and Colonial Urbanism of Purnia, a district in North Bihar. Her PhD, in progress, is focused on the late 19th and early 20th century Kosi belt after the river's shift.

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. 

Mr. Kanhaiya Kumar Yadav is an Assistant Professor, Department of History, Miranda House College. He has completed his MPhil in Modern Indian History from Department of History, University of Delhi. He is interested in Cultural History. He has worked on the Bhikhari Thakur's Bhojpuri literary tradition in colonial western Bihar, and is currently engaged in looking at the Bhojpuri mass culture from a linguistic perspective. His PhD is an attempt to put in a historical perspective the problems and complexities of bhojpuri mass culture and its changes from oral and visual tradition to linguistic standardization during the years 1835-1955 in colonial North India.  

Kanhaiya Kumar Yadav has taught papers like History of Modern China (1840-1950),Cultural Transformation in Early Modern Europe (i & ii), History of India (1200-1550), History of the USA: Reconstruction to New Age Politics, Medieval Societies: Global Perspectives, Culture  and Communication, Gandhi and Education etc.

Rohit Rai is Assistant Professor in the Department of History 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, Inequality and Difference, Understanding Popular Culture, The Making of Contemporary India, Religious Traditions in the Indian Subcontinent, Reading the Archives, Constitutional Values and Fundamental Duties etc.

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.