Research, personal story frame professor’s new book
The intellectual questions Durba Mitra asks are formed as much from her archival research as from her conversations with women on their experiences of social judgment and subordination and their efforts to challenge strict social norms. Perhaps no one has influenced her more than her own mother, who was open with Mitra, assistant professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and Carol K. Pforzheimer Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute, about the unique challenges of being an independent woman in a world that, too often, has little space for independent women. “Many communities have all sorts of expectations about women and young girls, about looks, about how one is supposed to comport oneself in a room, about how to be appropriate, about how deferential we are supposed to be. My mother was always very clear to me. There’s no deference to be had,” said Mitra, who recently published “Indian...