Dr Sneha Krishnan

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 writes and teaches on gender, domesticity, and the politics of intimacy in the British Colonial World. She’s currently writing a book about homemaking outside caste conjugality in early 20th century India, and has written and published on girlhood, race, sexuality, urban geographies of risk and respectability. Sneha is also a public scholar, and her work has appeared in Verso, Public Books, the History Workshop, and other publications.

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. In 2024, Sneha was also a Research Visitor at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Centre in Massachusetts.

Sneha is an Editor of Gender, Place, and Culture, and Editorial Board Member of Social History. Previously she has been 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.

More on Sneha’s work and speaking schedule is available on www.snehakrishnan.com

Sneha is currently working on two major projects. Her monograph on domesticity asks how we might rethink the history of domestic modernity in late colonial India from missionary schools and women’s colleges. The project draws outward from a history of Women’s Christian College in Madras (now Chennai), to trace a historical geography of Christian womanhood in the 1910s to the 1960s that unsettles the concatenation of woman-home-nation that is typically taken as the centrepiece of gender in early 20th century India. Instead, the book show, unmarried women and women who centred their lives around scholarship and friendships rethought ‘home’ as figured through intimate relationships of care wrought in the encounters across caste and ethnicity that occurred in missionary educational institutions.

In Abolitionist Domesticity, a collaboration with Laura Antona (LSE), Sneha and Laura argue that central to the project of abolition is the question of how to make home - to build, and dwell in worlds that operate outside the systemic violence of carcerality and premature death. The project traces geographies of home - historical and contemporary - as integral to the critique of racial capitalist carceral logics. The project asks how, in proliferating geographies of enclosure and containment that range from militarised zones to concentration camps to prisons to the hyper-surveillance and liberal humanitarian scrutiny of caste-marginalised and racialised communities, people make home, build everyday life, and envision abolitionist futures.

Undergraduate

Sneha lectures on the Human Geography, and Human Geography Methods 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 Geographies of Home.

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 supervises students across Geography, Development Studies, History, and Anthropology.

In Geography, Sneha teaches on Feminist Approaches and the Plantationocene for the MSc in Nature, Society, and Environmental Governance.

She is also a member of the core teaching faculty for the MSt in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, for which she teaches an elective, At Home in a Colonial World, and co-convenes the Feminist Approaches core module.

Sneha welcomes enquiries from graduate students with interests in the following broadly defined fields: feminist/queer studies, geographies of race, gender and sexuality, geographies of home and domesticity, childhood and youth, colonial and postcolonial geographies, South Asia and the British colonial world, archival methods.