Covid made me leave my home, my family and friends and move thousands of miles away to try and get a PhD!
It’s not as dramatic as it sounds, but I think spending those days locked away, I spent so much time reading and digging up old documents in the house that I realised
I can do this for a living.
My AHRC funded PhD is on the lives and politics of Bengali revolutionary women. I work with fragments: letters, notes, marginalia and try to reconstruct the stories of these lives. I work multilingually and trace the politics of remembrance and archiving, the tactics and emotion behind revolutionary anticolonialism and feminised grammars of protest.
My project is simultaneously about the PhD – the politics of research itself: about archives and access, about translation and interpretation, about what it means to study the histories of women like these from within the institutional structures of the Global North.
It’s a deeply personal project, shaped by my own position as a Bengali woman researcher living in the UK, and by a commitment to writing history that is both critical and compassionate.
Malya b 