Dr. Joanna Simonow

Joanna Simonow is a historian of modern South Asia and joins the Department of History as Assistant Professor/Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin. Prior to joining the SAI, Joanna was Postdoc Research Fellow in the Kaete Hamburger Kolleg/Centre for Global Cooperation Research (KHK/GCR21) at the University of Duisburg-Essen (2020-2021), and a Swiss National Science Foundation Fellow in the Department of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna (2021).

She received her PhD from ETH Zurich in 2019. Her doctoral thesis After the Late Victorian Holocausts has dealt with the regional and transnational history of famine relief, nutritional development and food aid in late colonial and early postcolonial India. Her forthcoming book is under contract with Leiden University Press. Her current research project The Private in the Political: White Women, Interracial Intimacy, and the Global Pursuits of Indian Anticolonialism seeks to arrive at a nuanced understanding of the role of women, gender and sexuality in the global expansion of Indian anticolonialism. To this end, Joanna studies the complex personal, sexual and professional contacts that emerged from the encounter between ‘white’ women and Indian activists in Europe, the United States, Soviet Russia and South Asia in the 1910s to the 1940s.

Curriculum Vitae and Publications