Dr Meenu Deswal is a historian of Modern South Asia. She holds a PhD in History from the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, and an MA and MPhil from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. Her research broadly focuses on histories of social change, the law, and labor in rural communities in nineteenth and twentieth century North India. Currently she is working on a project on colonial jurisprudence and the regulation of rural women’s labor and conjugality in colonial Punjab.

Prior to joining the Moturi Satyanarayana Centre for Advanced Studies, she worked as an Editorial Assistant for the Comparative Studies in Society and History journal. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies; the Race, Law and History Program, and the Eisenberg Institute of Historical Studies, University of Michigan.