I use she / her pronouns. I grew up in the small town of Cuddalore near Pondicherry (the bit the French colonised, so I speak some) in India, and did a BA in History at Stella Maris College in Chennai (2009). I then came to Oxford for an MSc in Contemporary India, and then a DPhil in Development Studies. I was then a Junior Research Fellow at St John’s from 2015 to 2018, when I took up my current position at Brasenose. I am a historical and cultural geographer interested in girlhood, race, and cultures of domesticity in the British colonial world.

I joined the School of Geography and the Environment at Oxford as an Associate Professor in 2018. I am a Tutorial Fellow at Brasenose College. I write and teach on gender, domesticity, and the politics of intimacy in the British Colonial World. I am currently writing a book about homemaking outside caste conjugality in early 20th century India, and have written and published on girlhood, race, sexuality, and urban geographies of risk and respectability. I am also a public scholar, and my work has appeared in Verso, Public Books, the History Workshop, and other publications. I am an Editor of Gender, Place, and Culture, and Editorial Board Member of Social History. All my work, which includes teaching and research, is committed to antiracist, anti-caste, and trans-inclusive practice.

I teach on topics to do with race, gender, and colonialism, as well as qualitative and historical methods.

For the first year, I typically teach on the Human Geography core module, including lectures on Bodies, and Feminist Geographies. I also teach on the human geography methods course.

For Second and Third Years, I teach on the Space, Place, and Society core course, including lectures on Colonialism and Anticolonialism, as well as Gender, and on Geographical Thought where I do a lecture on Marxism and Feminism. I also offer an option course on Geographies of Home. Additionally, I also teach on the Nature, Society, and Environmental Governance Masters programme in the School of Geography, and on the MSt in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies offered by the Humanities Division.

Geography at Oxford is a lot like an interdisciplinary Liberal Arts degree. All our students do both physical and human geography in the first year, which means that it is a comprehensive training in the whole field. And it also means that our students develop skills in quantitative thinking, modelling, and lab analysis from their physical geographical work, in addition to critical thinking, writing, and policy analysis from the human geography components of their work.

I am currently working on two major projects. Her monograph on domesticity asks how we might rethink the history of domestic modernity in late colonial India from missionary schools and women’s colleges. The project draws outward from a history of Women’s Christian College in Madras (now Chennai), to trace a historical geography of Christian womanhood in the 1910s to the 1960s that unsettles the concatenation of woman-home-nation that is typically taken as the centrepiece of gender in early 20th century India. Instead, the book shows, unmarried women and women who centred their lives around scholarship and friendships rethought ‘home’ as figured through intimate relationships of care wrought in the encounters across caste and ethnicity that occurred in missionary educational institutions.

In Abolitionist Domesticity, a collaboration with Laura Antona (LSE), we argue that central to the project of abolition is the question of how to make home – to build, and dwell in worlds that operate outside the systemic violence of carcerality and premature death. The project traces geographies of home – historical and contemporary – as integral to the critique of racial capitalist carceral logics. The project asks how, in proliferating geographies of enclosure and containment that range from militarised zones to concentration camps to prisons to the hyper-surveillance and liberal humanitarian scrutiny of caste-marginalised and racialised communities, people make home, build everyday life, and envision abolitionist futures.

http://www.snehakrishnan.com

https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/defending-racist-speech-will-not-free-palestine?_pos=1&_sid=2e389b5fa&_ss=r

https://www.publicbooks.org/merit-must-fall/

https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/education/radical-object-a-colonial-schoolboys-report-card/