Dr Sneha Roy
IASH-CTPI Duncan Forrester Fellow, November 2025 - August 2026
Home institution: University of Edinburgh
Dr Sneha Roy is intrigued by right-wing women, their disputed agency, and their ways of femininising forms of violence in activism for religion and nation. She was awarded the British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2022 for a three-year project that seeks to identify and understand the ways in which women of the Hindu-right/Hindutva organisation (Samaj Seva Bharati Pashchim Banga) conceptualise religious nationalism to interact with and navigate the politics of ecology in the Sundarbans, a tempestuous borderland region between India and Bangladesh. Hindu nationalists mediate between ‘saffron’ (symbolising Hindutva) and ‘green’ (symbolising ecology) politics to participate in environmental protection, which are locally demonstrated but are subsumed under the agenda of national identity. Her PhD investigated the position and roles of Buddhist nuns in enabling and hindering Buddhist nationalism in Myanmar.
During her IASH-CTPI Fellowship, she will explore the role of borders in ‘Making of a nation, the national and nationalism’.