Ishita Pande 

Associate Professor,

Colonial and Modern South Asia, British Empire,
Postcolonial theory and South Asian Diaspora

E-mail: pande@queensu.ca
Phone: 613-533-6000, ext: 74373
Fax: 613-533-6298
Office: Watson Hall 223
Office Hours:  Wednesday, 2.30-4.30 pm and by appointment

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Education  

Ph.D., Princeton University, New Jersey
M.A., Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi
B.A., St. Stephen's College, Delhi

About

Ishita Pande is a historian of post/colonial South Asia, particularly interested in colonial governmentality in British India. Her recently-published book Medicine, Race and Liberalism in British Bengal: Symptoms of Empire (Routledge: London and New York, 2010) is a study of the impact of the colonial connection on race science in Britain, the resonances between race science and imperial liberalism, the crucial role played by medical experts in the theory and practice of colonial government, and the use of a medicalized idiom in the fashioning of the Bengali 'modern' in the long nineteenth century.

Her interest in a critical understanding of colonial modernity continues to drive her work in a SSHRC-funded project on the politics of childhood, marriage and sexuality in late colonial India. As part of a larger project on the entanglement of culture-specific sexual norms and universal definitions of childhood, as articulated through child-marriage legislation in the twentieth century, she is also studying the 'globalization' of such legislation through the 'webs of empire' and international law in this period.

Her teaching reflects this interest in the history of South Asia and the diaspora, the British Empire, legal cultures, and gender and sexuality. In 2011-12, she will be teaching HIST 809: Britain and the empire/ Postcolonialism; and HIST 310: Modern India.

Dr. Pande welcomes graduate students who wish to work on any aspect of the history of colonialism in India and the South Asian diaspora, with a focus on race, gender and sexuality, the history of science and medicine, law and childhood.

Courses Taught

HIST 200: India and the world
HIST 310: Introduction to Modern India: Nationalism, Modernity, Postcoloniality
HIST 414:Colonial India: The State, Knowledge and Power
HIST 200: India and the World
HIST 446: Gender and Sexuality in South Asia
HIST 447: Sex and Race in the History of Medicine
HIST 407: Themes in the history of India

Graduate course

HIST 809: Post/colonialism: Britain and the Empire, 1780-1947
Principal fields for graduate supervision:

South Asian history in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, South Asian diasporas, British empire, subaltern studies and postcolonial theory, colonial science and medicine, gender and sexuality, race science, childhood studies.

Major Publications

Medicine, Race and Liberalism in British Bengal: Symptoms of Empire (Routledge: London and New York, 2010)