Ms Rajosmita Roy

Rajosmita Roy is a doctoral researcher in History with interests in the history of modern South Asia, imperial, gender and print history. Her research is funded by the SOAS Research Studentship. 

Her work studies the multiplicity in discourses of womanhood in relation to the making of the Bengali public sphere through writings of Bengali women in the periodical press between colonialism and nationalism in British India. She engages with a vast range of Bengali periodicals that were published between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to understand the distinctive nature of ‘gendered colonial modernities’ that were coming to be shaped by vernacular print cultures in Calcutta during this time. She asks: How does reading and writing through these women’s periodicals complicate the bhadramahila identity, which has been oversimplified and treated as a pre-ordained category across imperial, South Asian and gender historiography? She has been working on her PhD under the supervision of Dr Eleanor Newbigin since 2023. She also serves as one of the three primary editors for the Journal of the History of Ideas Blog. 

She has also been supervising Masters students on their dissertations, here at SOAS, in the Gender, Sexuality and Global Politics course. Prior to this, she had been awarded the Chancellor’s International Scholarship at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex where she received her Masters in Gender and Development Studies. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in History from Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi, India. Her writings have appeared in Political Theology—Routledge and Women & Society: Journal of the Advanced Centre for Women’s Studies. With her deep interest in public histories and the urgent need to bridge the substantial gap between the pedagogy of history at schools versus that in higher education, she worked on the research and development of the project History for Peace under The Seagull Foundation for the Arts for three years before starting her PhD.

• History of Modern South Asia 
• History of Imperialism 
• Gender History 
• Print History