Introducing… The History Room, a new series

As part of our interest in documenting women’s work in the public sphere, we are starting a series of email interviews that we will carry in our blog. The series will feature senior scholars working on women’s history, senior women historians, biographers of women, women biographers and some other social scientists and humanities scholars.

A short, more or less standard, list of questions will be used for the interviews, answers to which could provide insights into the following concerns: professional choices and challenges; the evolution of research interests; current research and its significance; research wishlist (what the scholar would like to work on); emerging questions/issues. Our idea is to showcase scholarship in a format that is accessible even to the casual reader, who is more likely to read a conversation than a journal article, but who will still benefit from learning some of the issues and insights in that scholarship. And whose interest might well be piqued to make them look for more.

These blog interviews are essentially glimpses of women in the public sphere, mostly academic women. With these “snippet” interviews, what we’re trying to do is trace the evolution behind their interest in history, and what draws them (or does not) to a gendered approach or feminist perspective.

We aim to blog one interview a month as of now; depending on when the responses come in!

This month, we feature Dr. Anupama Rao.

Introducing: A new review series, Niharika’s Bookshelf

Niharika M., a student of literature at Stella Maris College, Chennai, will be writing a regular book review series for The PSW Weblog, starting this week. “Niharika’s Bookshelf” holds biographies, autobiographies, memoirs and fiction by women that tells life-stories or historical stories.

At Prajnya, we believe that stories–historical or fictional–hold the key to understanding the lives and work of women across the centuries. This series brings to light stories we may or may not have heard of,  and lives worthy of remembering. The first book featured says exactly what we want to:  They are all lives less ordinary, and all extraordinary journeys, and that is why women’s stories are worth documenting and remembering.

Niharika will be the anchor-reviewer of this series, but we invite you to submit reviews as well and to engage with her reviews on a regular basis. As long as the reviews are thematically relevant to our interests and well-written, we will gladly publish them on the blog.