Doctoral Student Fellow
PhD Candidate, Department of History, Graduate School of Arts & Science
Project: A Measure of Value: Life, Land and Agrarian Financialization in India, 1850-1950
Meghna Chaudhuri is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at NYU. Her dissertation reconstructs the relationship between life insurance and forms of agrarian financialization in colonial India. The project argues that this relationship reveals a longer history of the developmentalist state in South Asia, and its role in the global emergence of a discourse on agrarian hinterlands as spaces of absence, that continues to mark contemporary understandings of financial inclusion across the Global South. Her research is a materially informed intellectual history of the forms of value creation that produced and were produced by changing conceptions of value, and values – such as hard work, thrift and planning forward – over the course of a 170 years. Her research reflects her interest in cultures of risk, national economics, and the history of science. Prior to pursuing a PhD at NYU, Meghna completed an MA and an MPhil in Modern South Asian History at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.