Tiraana Bains
Bio:
Tiraana’s research is focussed on early modern South Asia in the context of the global British empire, and the Persianate world. She is interested in the evolution of the English East India Company, particularly debates over slavery, political economy, and empire in the Indian Ocean world as well as across the globe. Other major interests include the British engagement with Persianate textual cultures, specifically British translations and reproductions of Persian texts through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Tiraana graduated with a dual B.A. and M.A. degree from Yale College in 2015. She completed a senior thesis analyzing increasing official disavowal of mixed relationships between British men and Indian women by the British state in Bengal in the late eighteenth century. The thesis’ emphasis on questions of subalternity, gender, identity, and state formation remain at the core of her historical interests. Over the past few years, Tiraana has been studying Arabic, French, and Persian.
As a graduate student at Yale she has helped coordinate the CHESS (Center for Historical Enquiry and the Social Sciences ) workshop, and is currently one of the organizers of the Early Modern Empires Workshop.