I am an early-career historian of the British Empire focusing on race, gender, embodiment, and corporeal consumption in South Asia. I completed my BA in English and History and MA in Contemporary History and International Politics at the University of York before undertaking a PhD at the University of Cambridge. I recently defended my doctoral thesis, entitled ‘Race, Gender and Beauty in late colonial India c.1900-1950,’ in the Faculty of History at Cambridge (2021). My thesis, to be adapted into a monograph, examined how bodies were racialised and historicised colourism and practices of skin-lightening in colonial South Asia. I have an article based on this research in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies. My previous research includes investigating identity politics and beauty culture amongst Black British communities in post-war Britain — a chapter based on this research is forthcoming in British Culture After Empire: Migration, Race and Decolonisation, 1945-Present (Manchester University Press, 2021). My research expertise includes the intertwined histories of health and beauty commoditisation, history of medicine, material cultures of cosmetics, and racialised and gendered embodiment in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I am also interested and invested in public and oral histories as well as practices of archive formation and collecting. I have blogged for Doing History in Public, The Recipes Project, and the British Library’s Endangered Archives blog.
Twitter: @amhuss27