Maya M. Haidar

My project, titled “Becoming the Memsahib: the performance of gender in British India (1880-1910)” examines a wide range of cultural productions by women in colonial India through a literary-critical lens to show how constructions of gender were reconfigured by different genres including memoirs, letters, fiction, advice manuals, and photography. It builds on 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.

I received a BA (Hons) in English at Ashoka University in India in 2021. After graduating, I spent a year teaching English in two secondary schools in Picardy, France. In 2023, I completed a master’s degree in Comparative Literature at University College London, graduating with a Distinction and earning on the Dean’s List). From 2023 to 2025, I worked as a lectrice d’anglais at the Sorbonne in Paris.

My PhD will be supervised by Professor Clare Pettitt, and is generously co-funded by the Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC DTP and Newnham College.