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 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 has been the recipient of a British Academy Wolfson Fellowship and a John Fell Fund. She was a 2024 Research Visitor at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Centre in Massachusetts.

Sneha is an Editor of Gender, Place, and Culture, Editorial Board Member of Social History and Asia Network co-chair for the European Social Science History Conference. Previously she has been Associate Editor and Editorial Board Member of the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.

The long arc of Sneha’s scholarship asks how experiences of emotion and intimacy are implicated in the geopolitical formations of empire and nation. Sneha’s early work has interrogated articulations of risk and pleasure in urban geographies in contemporary India, showing how young women engage in practices of ingenuity, humour, and collaboration to have fun amidst proliferating networks of surveillance. More recently, Sneha’s work has focused on home as a locus for a liberatory politics. In a book-in-progress, Sneha draws on historical research on single women in early 20th century India to ask how women articulated geographies of domesticity outside the normative concatenation of woman and nation. In a collaboration with Laura Antona (LSE), Sneha’s work asks what an abolitionist politics of home might look like: what does it mean to imagine dwelling places through the lens of collective liberation, rather than security?

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 human geographical topics and using qualitative methods. 
 

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 prospective DPhil Students in the broadly stated fields she has researched and published in, as well as any work that draws on critical archival methods.