• Vita

    Joanna Simonow is a social historian whose particular area of expertise is the modern history of South Asia. Her academic writing is characterised by her wide-ranging interests in social movements, internationalism, and decolonial mobilisation. She has published on aid (and its absence) during famines in colonial South Asia, as well as on the sexual politics that underpinned Indian anti-colonial activism in Europe during the interwar period and beyond. Joanna was awarded her PhD from ETH Zurich in 2019. She was a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Global Cooperation Research in Duisburg-Essen (2020–2021), a SNF Postdoc Mobility Fellow at the Department of Contemporary History in Vienna (2021), and Assistant Professor of History at the South Asia Institute at Heidelberg University (2021–2024). 

  • Forschungsprojekt

    Transnational Legal Landscapes of Cross-border Marriages: Examining Marriage Migration between South Asia and Europe “from below”, c. 1914–1945
    The historical period spanning the onset of the First World War to the 1940s — a time characterised by imperial crises, decolonial mobilisation and increased migration — was a pivotal phase in the development of legal and administrative responses to "marriage migration". My EViR project examines the contact, conflict and convergences between European empires and nations in the regulation of marriage and migration, taking South Asian mobility to Europe in the first half of the twentieth century as its starting point. Through a number of case studies, I analyse the 'embodied encounters' (Scheel & Gutekunst, 2019) between couples and border agents in countries of both origin and destination. I use these encounters as analytical windows onto the complex legal and administrative frameworks that governed access to marriage and marital life for couples crossing multiple borders: national, imperial, religious, and racial. I simultaneously examine how couples navigated, evaded and resisted legal and administrative barriers erected against their marriages and migration, and their strategies of "marital deviance" and "counter-mobility". My aim is to contribute to the research agenda of EViR by providing a historical study of the interplay, conflict and harmonisation of national, imperial and colonial legal frameworks that regulated marriage migration during the late era of European imperialism.

  • Einschlägige Veröffentlichungen

    Joanna Simonow, "Sexing the History of Anti-colonial Internationalism: White Women, Indian Men and the Politics of the Personal," Gender & History (2024), DOI: 10.1111/1468-0424.12801.

    Joanna Simonow, Ending Famine in India. A Transnational History of Food Aid and Development, ca. 1890-1950 (Leiden University Press, 2023).

    Joanna Simonow, "The Rise and Demise of Multi-Purpose Food in India: Food Technology, Population Control and Nutritional Development in the Post-War Era, c. 1944–66," South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 44.1 (2021), 167–84.

    Joanna Simonow, "The Great Bengal Famine in Britain: Metropolitan Campaigning for Food Relief and the End of Empire, 1943–44," The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 48.1 (2020), 168–97.

    Joanna Simonow, "Der Hungertod in Bildern. Fotografien in der öffentlichen Debatte um Hungerhilfe für Bengalen 1943," Zeithistorische Forschungen–Studies in Contemporary History 18.2 (2022), 346–62.

    Joanna Simonow, “American Humanitarianism in Colonial South Asia: The Famine Relief of the American Marathi Mission in Bombay, 1896–1900” in Harald Fischer-Tiné and Nico Slate (eds), The United States and South Asia from the Age of Empire to Decolonization: A History of Entanglements (Leiden University Press, 2022), 85–106.