Shivangi Kaiswal, PhD

Research Fellow, Department of Humanities, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy.

Shivangi Jaiswal is a Research Fellow (postdoctoral) in Contemporary History at the Department of Humanities, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy. She is a member of the ERC project WO-NAM– ‘Women and Non-Alignment in the Cold War Era: Biographical and Intersectional Perspectives’, led by Chiara Bonfiglioli. Her current research examines Indian women’s non-aligned internationalism and anti-imperialist activism during the global Cold War. She is a historian specialising in social history of late colonial and postcolonial India, with research interests and publications in labour history, women’s history and oral history. She holds a PhD in History from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, with a thesis titled “Representing Labour: Dalits, Workers, and the State in India, 1942-52”. She received fellowships from the Erasmus+ Programme and the Charles Wallace India Trust. Previously, she worked as a Research Associate on projects focused on labour, caste, women, and education.

Statement of interest:

During the INZ Visiting Fellowship (March 2027), I look forward to exchange perspectives with an international scholarly community on shared research themes, particularly the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), the global Cold War, and grassroots feminist activism. I am further drawn to the institute’s methodological expertise in comparative, transnational, and intellectual history, which resonates with my current research interest in exploring entangled global histories of anti-imperialism. My research on Indian women’s non-aligned and anti-imperialist internationalism aligns with Agustín Cosovschi’s ERC project “Brokers of NAM” at INZ. Drawing on extensive archival research in India, including biographies, women’s writings, speeches, private papers, oral histories, and vernacular archives of women’s organisations, my research examines how women redefined the idea of NAM through their anti-imperialist imaginaries and transnational solidarities in the context of decolonisation, the New International Economic Order (NIEO) and the UN Decade for Women.

Selected Publications:

[In Press] “Between Resistance and Dialogues: Emerging Networks of Solidarity in Representing Women Workers in Colonial India, 1930s–1940s”, in Francesca Piana, Donald Weber, Susan Zimmermann, eds. Nested Internationalisms: Labour Activism Across Social Movements in the Twentieth Century (Palgrave Macmillan 2026).
‘Vocations for the Poor Married Women: An Oral History’, in Janaki Nair ed., Un/Common Schooling: Educational Experiments in Twentieth Century India (Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2022).
‘Labour Ministers, State and the Prism of Law, 1942-52’, Südasien-Chronik – South Asia Chronicle 8/2018, S. 233-256, Südasien-Seminar der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, ISBN: 978-3-86004-337-0, 2018.
‘Behind the Transcript, Beyond the Recorder: Notes from the Diary of a Research Assistant’, Words and Silences: The Journal of the International Oral History Association, Online ISSN 2222-4181, 2018.
‘Caste and Labour in the Official Discourse of India, Analysing the Grammar of Caste in the Labour Department, 1942-52’, in Sabyasachi Bhattacharya and Rana P. Behal, eds. The Vernacularization of Labour Politics (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2016). The paper also appeared in the journal Labour and Development, Vol. 21, No. 1, June 2014.