Ms Shuvatri Dasgupta

My doctoral dissertation is tentatively titled: "A History of Conjugality in the British Empire c.1850-1947." It deals with the political economy of marriage by looking at it through the intersectional lens of global capital and patriarchy--in an attempt to argue that the liminality of the institution of marriage between private and public spheres, male and female lifeworlds, and legal and customary practices, has obfuscated its centrality in socio-political and economic histories of empires. Through this historically contextualised investigation of family, marriage and kinship, my dissertation seeks to explore the larger shared abstract vocabularies within diverse forms of heteronormative union. By using the lens of Social Reproduction Theory (and Marxist-feminist scholarship in general)  it attempts to establish the importance of uncovering these histories not just as legal or gender histories, but as the origin point of private property ownership and capitalist exploitation, in human history. 

My general research interests include global history, gender history, intellectual history and political thought, environmental history, histories of empire, political theory, histories of capitalism, Marxist and Marxist-feminist theory, and critical theory in general.