Rovel Sequeira

I am an Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and former LSA Collegiate Postdoctoral Fellow (2022-24) at the University of Michigan. I work on the connected histories of formations of sexuality, gender, race, and empire in modern South Asia and the British empire, and my current research focuses on the histories and fictions of sexology in colonial India. I earned my PhD in English with a concentration in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. My work has been featured in interdisciplinary journals like GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, History of the Human Sciences, Modernism/modernity, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and Museums, Sexuality, and Gender Activisms. In these forums, I have explored questions like what makes an HIV/AIDS clinic for sex workers billed as a sex museum thrive or fold in 21st century Mumbai, how prisons in Calcutta and the Andaman Island penal settlement became improvised sexological laboratories in turn-of-the-20th-century colonial India, and how contemporary Indian hijra-trans activists mobilize the literary genre of the autobiography and the social scientific genre of the ethnography to appropriate normative U.S.-centric conceptions of gender rights as human rights. Before joining the University of Michigan, I was a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow and held the Harry Ransom Center dissertation research fellowship at the University of Texas (Austin).