Durba Mitra, Assistant Professor, South Asian History, is interested in the role of sexuality in the intellectual and cultural histories of modern South Asia. Her current project investigates how the figure of the sexually deviant woman, often depicted as the prostitute, was central in the making of a new sociological imagination in Bengal in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She specializes in the social and intellectual histories of Modern South Asia, histories of sexuality, the history of science and medicine, the history of women and gender, and comparative histories of marginality and difference.