Tuesday, April 14, 2009

3-5pm, CHAT Seminar Room

10th Floor Gladfelter Hall

Writing Women's History: Underwriting Silences, Gaps, and Omissions in the Archives

 

How does a historian make social history richer and fuller, when religious and political forces tend to appropriate issues concerning women? Reflecting on her work on the courtesans of Lucknow, on Roop Kanwar's sati/murder, on dowry and dowry murder, female infanticide, and gendered violence in Tulsidas's Ramayana, Professor Oldenburg wishes to discuss the problems, delights, and the complexities of writing from a feminist perspective. The hope in this session is to have multiple conversations about our exploratory encounters in the archives and in interviews with women and the legal apparatus that ultimately re-defines social issues.

 

About the speaker: Veena Talwar Oldenburg is Professor of History, Baruch College & The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research interrogates the structures and functioning of colonial India and its impact on and response in both urban and rural settings. She is the author of the now classic The Making of Colonial Lucknow, 1856-1877 (Princeton, 1984; Oxford University Press in the Lucknow Omnibus, 2002), Dowry Murder: The Imperial Origins of a Cultural Crime (Oxford, 2002) and a fabled essay of historical ethnography, "Lifestyle as Resistance: The Case of the Courtesans of Lucknow." She recently edited Shaam-e-Awadh: Writings on Lucknow (2007) in the Penguin city series. Oldenburg is a recipient of awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the Social Science Research Council, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Smithsonian Institution, and the National Endowment for the Arts.