• Satyasikha Chakraborty
  • Satyasikha Chakraborty
  • Current Research: South Asia, British Empire & Postcolonialism, Women’s & Gender History

Satyasikha is a PhD Candidate in the History Department at Rutgers University. Before joining Rutgers, she did an MA in History with certification in Women’s Studies from Jadavpur University in India. Satyasikha is interested in South Asian and British imperial histories of gender, sexuality, medicine, and visual culture. Her dissertation The “Faithful” Ayah in Colonial Households: Gender, Caste, and Race of South Asian Domestic Labors analyzes household labors, oppressions and intimacies from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries through the figure of a South Asian maidservant – the ayah. Excavating the stories of individual ayahs from legal, cultural, medical, and vernacular archives, her thesis provides an intimate domestic history of liberal imperialism, free-market colonial capitalist circulation of labor, colonial medicine, and anti-colonial nationalism. Her dissertation brings into conversation South Asian and British imperial historiographies on one hand; and, postcolonial subaltern studies and Black feminist intersectional theories on the other hand.

Peer-reviewed Publications:

“‘Nurses of Our Ocean Highways’: The Precarious Metropolitan Lives of Colonial South Asian Ayahs”, Journal of Women’s History (Forthcoming, 2019)

“Mammies, Ayahs, Baboes: Postcards of racialized nursemaids from the Early Twentieth Century”, Visual Culture and Gender, Vol.13, (Forthcoming, 2018)

“European nurses and governesses in Indian Princely households: ‘Uplifting that impenetrable veil?’” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, Volume 19, Number 1, Spring 2018

Courses Designed and Taught:

“World History, 1500 to present”, 2018

“The Age of European Global Expansion”, 2017