Durba Mitra is a historian of modern South Asia. She specializes in its social and intellectual history, as well as histories of sexuality and the history of science and medicine. At the Forum, she will be focusing on her book manuscript, Sex and The New Science of Society in Colonial India. In this work, she 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 eastern India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Bowdoin College and a Fulbright scholar to India.