Dr Sameera Chauhan

Sameera is a historian of British colonialism in South Asia, examining the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and class. Her research focuses on how imperial states governed marginalized populations through law, medicine, and spatial regulation.

Her doctoral thesis examined the military regulation of prostitution in colonial Punjab, analyzing how colonial perceptions of native female sexuality and venereal disease produced new criminal categories and fueled anxieties about imperial weakness through racial contamination.

Her current research extends these questions through a comparative study of vagrancy laws in colonial India and other British jurisdictions, including Australia, tracing how empires constructed and policed mobility, poverty, and itinerancy across different imperial contexts.