Rochona Majumdar
South Asian Languages and Civilizations; Chair, CSGS Curriculum Committee
Rochona Majumdar (PhD 2003, University of Chicago) is a historian of nineteenth and twentieth century India. Her Book Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal, 1870-1956 (Duke University Press, 2009) analyzes the changing configuration of the "joint family" and patriarchy in the context of shifts in the institution of arranged marriage and the marriage market in Bengal. Her second book Writing Postcolonial History analyzes ways in which postcolonial theory has influenced the historian's craft globally. She is a co-editor with Dipesh Chakrabarty and Andrew Sartori of From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Majumdar is currently engaged in a project on the history of film societies in India. Film societies were critical to the birth of a "new Indian cinema" and also serve as an excellent ground to analyze the relationship between a mass medium and radical politics in the world's largest democracy. A second project focuses on the history of Indian intellectual thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Majumdar teaches courses on Indian cinema, histories of gender, love, and marriage in South Asia, and modern Indian history.