
Dr Mishka Sinha
Research Fellow (University of Edinburgh’s Historical Links to African Enslavement and Colonialism), 2022-23
Home Institution: University of Edinburgh
Dr Mishka Sinha is a Research Fellow on the Research and Engagement Working Group (REWG) working on Edinburgh’s links with colonialism, with a particular focus on South Asia. Mishka is a cultural and intellectual historian of the modern period, interested in the history of knowledge production, transfer and reception in the context of colonialism and inequalities of power. She took her BA degree at St. Xavier's College, Bombay, an MPhil at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and her PhD at Queens' College,Cambridge. She has previously held research fellowships at St. John’s College, Oxford (St. John’s and the Colonial Past), the Faculty of History, Cambridge (British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow), the European University Institute, Florence (Max Weber Fellow), and the Freie Universität, Berlin (Zukunftsphilologie Fellow). Her academic research focusses on the history of books, universities, institutions, scholarship, disciplinary formations, language, translation and text circulations, and intellectual, cultural and material heritage, across Britain and Europe, the United States and Asia, in the late-eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is also interested in the connected histories of orientalism, occultism, and literary and aesthetic modernism. She has taught undergraduate, post-graduate and PhD seminars and papers in global, imperial and South Asian history, historical theory and method, contested heritage and colonialism, PhD writing, and the global history of books, at Cambridge, Oxford, London and Florence. Mishka has a long-standing involvement with contemporary Indian art and art heritage in which field she has worked as an administrator and performer. She is and has been a committee member, consultant and invited speaker on projects and initiatives concerning institutional heritage, colonialism and global history for the Oxford National Trust Partnership, Ashmolean Museum, English Heritage, Bodleian Libraries, the Department for Continuing Education, Oxford and Ruskin College, OUP’s APA textbook on Britain and Empire, and is a member of the Advisory Board of the Schools of Empire project at Rugby. Mishka uses English, Bangla and Hindi as native languages, has intermediate level German, basic Italian, and reading literacy in Sanskrit. In her spare time - when she has any - she loves reading detective, science and fantasy fiction, grammar, poetry and popular science, spending time with her six-year-old and with cats (most especially, but not exclusively, her own), and dreaming of going for long wild tramps in hilly country.