Teaching Fellows

Zoya Sameen is a historian of gender, law, and empire in nineteenth-and twentieth-century South Asia. Her current book project The Scatter of Empire examines how legislative interventions into prostitution in colonial India such as regulatory laws, cantonment codes, municipal rules, and border regimes were circumvented and challenged by the Indian and European women they targeted. Pushing against established histories of colonialism, gender, and sexuality in India that have focused on governmental power via legislation and codification, this book project foregrounds notions of trouble and disruption to present a new reading of colonial interventions into sexuality as they unfolded on the scattered ground of empire. Sameen’s research interests also include understanding gender history at the intersection of law, technology, and environment. She completed her PhD in History at the University of Chicago in 2022. She also holds an MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago and a BA in History from SOAS, University of London. 

Learn more about Sameen here.