Fellows » Current Fellows » IHUM Fellow: Parna Sengupta, PhD
Parna Sengupta received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Before coming to Stanford, she was a faculty member in the history department at Carleton College. Parna’s research interests include South Asian religions, gender, Empire and politics. Her recently published book is entitled Pedagogy for Religion: Missionary Education and the Fashioning of Hindus and Muslims in Colonial Bengal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). The book offers a new approach to the study of religion and empire by challenging a widespread myth of modernity--that Western rule has had a secularizing effect on the non-West. By looking closely at missionary schools in Bengal from 1850 to the 1930s, the book argues that modern education effectively reinforced the place of religion in colonial India. Debates over the mundane aspects of schooling, rather than debates between religious leaders, transformed the everyday definitions of what it meant to be a Christian, Hindu, or Muslim. The book concludes that the Sunday school and the Qur’an school must be seen in the same analytic frame, a part of the historical legacy of the imperial and missionary encounter. She is currently working on two projects, one on the place of astrology in modern India and the other on notions of political civility in the work of the feminist writer Rokeya Hossain. Parna is an associate director in Stanford Introductory Studies.