GRADUATION: March 2018 

Mou Banerjee was a PhD Candidate in the History Department at Harvard, specializing in Modern South Asian History. Her research explores the dialogues and debates of Indian intellectuals with evangelical Protestant Christianity and missionaries in the nineteenth century, especially in the Bengal Presidency in India. In her analysis of these debates, Banerjee charts the development of a complex relationship of overt repudiation and covert fascination, where Christianity was perceived as a religion and a philosophy, a discursive and dialectical category, a denominator of racial and social difference, and as a repository of Enlightenment ethos and modernity. Banerjee investigates the way in which this examination of Christianity represents a philosophical engagement, leading to contestation over the nature of faith's socio-political implications, and of the political responsibility of the colonized subjects.

Banerjee was the recipient of the 2013 SSRC-IDRF dissertation research fellowship and was a visiting scholar at the Centre for History and Economics at Magdalene College, Cambridge University, in the academic year 2014-2015.