Mahua Sarkar

Mahua Sarkar received her PhD in Sociology and Comparative International Development from the Johns Hopkins University. She is Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto, and the University of Toronto, Scarborough.

A historical sociologist by training, Professor Sarkar’s research and teaching is interdisciplinary and spans a range of topics including contemporary guest-work regimes; gestational surrogacy as a form of racialized and gendered labour; free and unfree/constrained work under global capitalism; religious nationalisms in South Asia; Muslim and Hindu identity formation and the gender question in late colonial Bengal; and epistemological debates underlying qualitative research methods. Her current writing project is an advanced monograph on Bangladeshi male contract migrants and contemporary guest-work.

Professor Sarkar is a recipient of multiple prestigious international fellowships that include a France-ILO Chair and Fellowship at the Institut d’Etudes Avancées de Nantes, a EURIAS and Marie Curie Fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, a fellowship at Re:work, Humboldt University, Berlin, a Visiting Senior Fellowship at the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore, and a Visiting Faculty position as the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. She serves as a series editor for Work in Global and Historical Perspective (De Gruyter Oldenbourg, Berlin and Boston), and is part of an international feminist research network on the Epistemologies of Care (based in Duke University).

Recent Publications

Work out of Place, Mahua Sarkar (ed.), Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2018.

Visible Histories / Disappearing Women: Producing Muslim Womanhood in Late Colonial Bengal. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.

“Outsourcing the Working Class: Guestwork in Turbulent Times.” In Dirk Hoerder and Lukas Neissl (eds.) Migration Worldwide: Left Wing Strategies, Migrant Actors and Capitalist Interests, 77-101. Studies in Global Migration History Series. Leiden: Brill (forthcoming 2023).

“Constrained Labour as Instituted Process: Transnational Contract Work and Circular Migration in Late Capitalism.” European Journal of Sociology/Archives Européennes de Sociologie, 58, 1, 2017: 171-204.

“Between Craft and Method: Meaning and Inter-Subjectivity in Oral History Analysis.” The Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 25, No. 4 (December 2012): 578-600.

“Difference in Memory”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 48, 1 (January 2006): 139-68.