Dr Divya Kannan
IASH-CWIT Fellow, May - July, 2026
Home institution: Shiv Nadar University Delhi-NCR
Dr. Divya Kannan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Archaeology, Shiv Nadar-University Delhi-NCR India. Her research interests are 19th and 20th South Asian history, childhood and youth studies, gender, empires, and education. She is also the co-founder and co-convenor of the online Critical
Childhoods and Youth Studies Collective (CCYSC). Her recent publications include the monograph Contested Childhoods: Caste and Education in Colonial Kerala ( Cambridge University Press, 2024) which was awarded the Grace Abbott Prize for the Best Book in English by the Society for the History of Children and Youth (SHCY), co-edited volume Childhood and Youth in India: Engagements with Modernity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) and a co-edited Special Issue: Modernity, Schooling, and Childhood in India: Trajectories of Exclusion, Children's Geographies (Vol. 20, 2022).
Her current research project explores the history and politics of social welfare and notions of childhood in post-independent India, with a focus on the international humanitarian networks forged by middle-class Indian female social welfare activists in southern India. During her stay at IASH Edinburgh, she will carry out research on the life and work of Mary Clubwala Jadhav, the founder of the Madras School of Social Work and a prominent social welfare activist.