Dr Sneha Krishnan

About

Sneha Krishnan is Associate Professor in Human Geography and Tutorial Fellow at Brasenose College. She comes to this position from a Junior Research Fellowship in Human Geography at St John's College, Oxford (2015 - 2018). Sneha did all her graduate work at Oxford (2015) and her undergraduate degree at the University of Madras in India (2009).

As a cultural and historical geographer, Sneha is interested in gender, childhood and the intersections of bio- and geopolitics in postcolonial contexts. Her doctoral research used ethnographic and historical research to focus on the spatialities of risk and safety in the lives of young middle-class women in the South Indian city of Chennai. Building on this, her monograph-in-progress examines hostels for women in historical context as sites where imperial logics endure into the postcolonial present.

In new work, Sneha builds on these interests to explore three inter-related themes. In two collaborations on childhood and feminist geopolitics, Sneha's work examines the territorial and demographic discourses that undergird constructions of childhood and youth in the Global South. A second project examines the gendered spatialities of suicide in India, specifically focusing on the historicity of 'youth suicide' as a site where territorial imaginaries and biopolitical concerns converge. A third methodological collaboration focuses on gender and digitized archives, with the goal both of creating a digital archive of women's materials from South Asia, as well as of building debate in feminist interdisciplinary studies on the spatiality of digital knowledge production.