Maya M. Haidar

My PhD thesis, titled “Becoming the Memsahib: the performance of gender in British India (1860-1910)” examines a wide range of cultural productions by and about British women in colonial India through a literary-critical lens to show how constructions of gender were reconfigured by different genres and media including memoirs, fiction, advice manuals, and photography. It will bring in a much wider range of perspectives by building a more comparative picture of the “memsahib”, engaging with Indian and French sources, as well as archival collections at the Centre for South Asian Studies in Cambridge and the Alkazi Collection of Photography in New Delhi.

My DPhil will be supervised by Professor Clare Pettitt, and is generously co-funded by the OOC AHRC-DTP and Newnham College.

I received a BA (Hons) in English at Ashoka University in India (2021), following which I spent a year teaching English in two secondary schools in Picardy, France. I completed my master’s degree in Comparative Literature at University College London in 2023 (graduating with a Distinction and on the Dean’s List). In my master’s dissertation, I brought a comparative lens to the role of the female caregiver in nineteenth-century British and French literatures, identifying how empathic identification serves as a driving narrative impulse. From 2023-2025, I worked as a lectrice d’anglais at Sorbonne University (Paris IV), where I taught English to undergraduate students across both the LEA (Applied Foreign Languages) and LLCE (Languages, Literature and Foreign Civilisations) programmes.