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Rukmini Barua

Faculty Associate

rbarua[at]yorku.ca

Assistant Professor

Department of History, York University


Research Keywords:

South Asia; urban; labour; gender; emotions


Research Region(s):

India, South Asia

Research Diaspora(s):

Indian Diaspora

Dr. Rukmini Barua is Assistant Professor of South Asian History in the Department of History. Before joining York University, Rukmini was a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for the History of Emotions, Max Planck Institute for Human Development.

Her research examines questions at the intersection of urban politics, labour and emotions with a focus on colonial and postcolonial India. Her first monograph, In the Shadow of the Mill: Workers’ Neighbourhoods in Ahmedabad, 1920s to 2000s, published by Cambridge University Press in 2022, analyzes urban change through the prism of everyday political practice and property relations in the Indian industrial city of Ahmedabad. Rukmini’s second book project is a historical ethnography of working-class intimacy, conjugality and domesticity in twentieth and twenty-first century India.

Her research has appeared in International Labor and Working-Class History, L’Homme, Zeitschrift für feministische Geschichtswissenschaft, and in a recent edited volume on Feelings and Work in Modern History: Emotional Labour and Emotions about Labour.


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