Samita Sen

Samita Sen received her Ph.D. from Cambridge University in 1992 and was JRF at Trinity College, 1990-1994. She taught at Calcutta University and Jadavpur University from 1994 to 2018. In this period, between 2013 and 2015, she served as First Vice-Chancellor, Diamond Harbour Women’s University. She was also Dean, Faculty of Interdisciplinary Studies (Jadavpur University), 2016-2018.
Her monograph, Women and Labour in Late Colonial India (Cambridge University Press, 1999) won the Trevor Reese Prize in Commonwealth History. She has published extensively on gender and labour. Her specialization is colonial South Asia but she has also done contemporary and interdisciplinary research on issues such as domestic violence and labour in the informal sector. She is a member of editorial boards of various academic journals, including Modern Asian Studies and South Asian History and Culture. She edited Global South: Sephis e-Magazine, one of the first online journals and a south-south platform for young scholars, from 2004 to 2014.
She has been active in the women’s movement in India and internationally. She participated in both the governmental and non-governmental fora of the Beijing Conference (1995). She has been a member of a Calcutta-based voluntary association of women, Sachetana, since 1983.