ISU History Professor Awarded Book Prize

Dr. Arunima Datta, assistant professor of history at Idaho State University, has just received the Western Association of Women Historians’ Gita Chaudhuri Book Award for her book Fleeting Agencies: A Social History of Indian Coolie Women In British Malaya, published by Cambridge University Press in 2021. 

 

The Gita Chaudhuri Prize recognizes the best monograph about the history of women in rural environments, from any era and any place in the world, published in the last three years. Fleeting Agencies, which is the first study of Indian coolie women in British Malaya to date, explores the politicization of labor migration trends and gender relations in the colonial plantation society. This is the second award Dr. Datta has won for her book. Earlier, her book received the prestigious National Women’s Studies Association’s Whaley Book Prize.