Kankana Chatterjee
Matric Year: 2022 – Subject: MSc Modern South Asian Studies – Scholarship: Oxford-Indira Gandhi-Radhakrishnan Scholar
Through her academic and research activities, Kankana questions the central role that conjugality has historically played in determining women’s social position and reception.
Kankana has always been moved by the gross deprivations meted out to single women, especially widows. Through her stint at Oxford, she intends to sharpen her critical understanding of the heteropatriarchal gender norms in order to address how or whether singlehood affects women’s access to developmental resources in the regime of governmentality, especially in the postcolonial condition.
Kankana gained her bachelor’s degree in 2020 from the Department of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. She is looking forward to receiving her master’s degree from the same department in 2022. As a student of Modern South Asian Studies at Oxford, she would like to complement her training in deciphering literary texts with some training in social research and an understanding of contemporary South Asia. She has been interested in studies on the long nineteenth century, life histories, postcolonial theory and literature, gender studies and translation and strongly believes that her regular participation in academic discussions in the areas of her interest has enhanced her critical and analytical skills and ability to think beyond disciplinary boundaries.