Academic Profile

Sneha Krishnan (she / her) joined the School of Geography and the Environment at Oxford as an Associate Professor in 2018. She is also a Tutorial Fellow at Brasenose College.

Sneha is a feminist historical and cultural geographer, whose work asks how emotions underpin projects of racial and gendered difference in the British colonial world. She is currently a British Academy -Wolfson Fellow, and her work has previously been funded through the John Fell Fund, and by a St John's College Junior Research Fellowship.

Sneha is a coordinator of the Political Worlds Research Cluster with Amber Murrey, and a member of the steering committee for Intersectional Humanities at TORCH. Beyond Oxford, Sneha is an Associate Editor and Editorial Board Member of the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, and Asia Network co-chair for the European Social Science History Conference.

Sneha is committed to anti-racist, anti-caste, and trans-inclusive practices in all her work.

Current Research

Sneha is currently working on finishing two monographs. The first, In Gilded Cages argues that hostels for girls - boarding houses for students and educated working women - are material expressions of enduring coloniality in urban India. The book's main contribution is in locating debates on colonial carcerality not only in zones of social abandonment - prisons, brothels, asylums - but at the heart of middle-class life. The second, Murder in Madras draws outward from an Oxfordshire family's history as educators in India to examine whiteness in Britain as inexorably linked to a fantasy of the moral empire. Sneha's British Academy - Wolfson Fellowship will enable her to begin new work looking at girlhood in the early and mid-20th century in India, as a site where internationalist imaginaries were made material through practices of letter writing. Sneha also has ongoing collaborative projects on carceral domesticities (with Laura Antona), on youth and decolonisation (with Sara Smith, Mabel Gergan, and Stephen Young), and on creepiness and sexual harassment in British universities (with Laura Ludtke). For further details on Sneha's current research, please see www.snehakrishnan.com

Current Teaching

Undergraduate

Sneha lectures on the Human Geography, and Geographical Controversies modules for the Preliminary Examination, and on the Space Place and Society and Geographical Thought modules for the Final Honours School. She also teaches an option course for third years on Childhood and Youth in the Global South.

At Brasenose, Sneha offers tutorials across the curriculum. She welcomes enquiries from undergraduates interested in writing dissertations in feminist, queer and post/decolonial geography, and on childhood and youth.

Graduate

Sneha currently co-supervises two DPhil students at Oxford. Sneha also offers an elective in the MSc/MPhil in Nature, Society and Environmental Governance on Colonial Histories of Nature. She also welcomes enquiries on supervision from MSc and MPhil students who are interested in historical methods, feminist methods, and questions of coloniality, childhood, and emotions.

Sneha welcomes enquiries from graduate students with interests in the following broadly defined fields: feminist/queer studies, geographies of race, gender and sexuality, geo- and biopolitics, childhood and youth, colonial and postcolonial geographies, South Asia.

Selected Publications

  • ORCID profile unavailable
  • Scopus profile unavailable
  • ResearchGate profile unavailable
  • Academia.edu profile unavailable
  • Google Scholar profile unavailable
  • ResearcherID profile unavailable

Journal Articles

Special / Edited Collections

  • Gergan, M., Krishnan, S., Smith, S. and Young, S. (forthcoming) Special issue 'Young People as Agents of Decolonization'. Antipode.
  • Robb, M., Chatterjee, E. and Krishnan, S. (2017) Special edition 'Urban Emotions: Responses to the South Asian City, c. 1850 – 1950'. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 27(4).

Book Chapters

  • Krishnan, S. (forthcoming) Bodies, Embodiment and Feeling. In, Barclay, K. and Stearns, P. (eds.) The Routledge History of Emotions in the Modern World. Routledge, London.
  • Krishnan, S. (2020) Children/Childhood. In, Kobayashi, A. (ed.) The International Encyclopedia of Human Geography (Second Edition). Elsevier, London. pp. 167-172.
  • Krishnan, S. (2020) Dreaming of Addis Ababa: In the Afterlives of Inter-War Christian Internationalism. In, Silva, K. and Franz, M. (eds.) Migration, Identity, and Belonging: Defining Borders and Boundaries of the Homeland. Routledge, New York.
  • Krishnan, S. (2018) Bitch don’t be a lesbian: Selfies, Selves and Same-Sex Desire. In, Dasgupta, R. and Dasgupta, D. (eds.) Queering Digital India: Activisms, Identities, Subjectivities. Oxford University Press, New York. pp. 151-164.
  • Krishnan, S. (2018) Style-ish Girls and Local Boys: Young Women and Fashion in Chennai. In, Lewis, R., Begum, L. and Dasgupta, R. (eds.) Styling South Asian Youth Cultures: Fashion, Media and Society. IB Tauris, London.
  • Krishnan, S. (2014) Responding to Rape: Feminism and Young Middle-Class Women in India. In, Alston, M. (ed.) Women, Political Struggles and Gender Equality in South Asia. Palgrove Macmillan, Basingstoke. pp. 19-32.

Other Publications