Dr. Elena Valdameri

Dr. Elena Valdameri

Lecturer at the Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences

ETH Zürich

Geschichte der modernen Welt

RZ G 25

Clausiusstrasse 59

8092 Zürich

Switzerland

Additional information

Course Catalogue

Autumn Semester 2024

Number Unit
851-0018-00L Doctoral Colloquium in History of the Modern World
851-0020-00L Gender and Science
Enlarged view: elena

I have been Senior Researcher/Oberassistentin at the Chair for the History of the Modern World since June 2021. I work on the history of modern South Asia, with specific interest and expertise in the history of political thought, the anticolonial movement, women’s history, the history and politics of the body and citizenship. Central focus of my ongoing research project Training Female Bodies, Making Good Citizens: Women’s Physical Education between Global Trends and Local Politics in India (1900s – 1950s) is the emergence of girls' and women's ‘modern’ physical education and its role in citizenship building in late colonial and early postcolonial India. In the SNSF-funded project Shaping Asian Future Generations in an Age of (De)Colonisation: Playgrounds and outdoor games in India and China (ca 1900s–1950s), I examine the emergence of playgrounds in (semi)colonial and postcolonial urban contexts as broadly educational and political sites where future generations were shaped according to different ways of thinking about childhood and youth.

My first monograph, external page Indian Liberalism between Nation and Empire: The Political Life of Gopal Krishna Gokhale, was published by Routledge in 2022. Based on my doctoral project, this political biography situates the Indian nationalist reformer Gopal Krishna Gokhale (1866-1915) in a transnational context and contributes to enriching the understanding of the Indian anticolonial movement as being influenced since its early phase by global constellations. Engaging with debates on the tensions inherent in liberalism and nationalism, the book provides a nuanced reassessment of Gokhale’s vision of the nation that had a lasting impact on the socio-political context of India in the following decades, well into independence. Influenced by my more recent research on the history of the body, I have co-edited the volume external page Bodies beyond Binaries in Colonial and Postcolonial Asia (Leiden University Press, 2024). This book brings together a range of contributions from established and emerging scholars working on different Asian regional and transregional foci and exploring the making of knowledge, cultural constructions, and ‘techniques’ of the body.

After completing my doctoral studies at the State University of Milan, I taught History of South Asia and Southeast Asia at the University of Pavia, and I was junior fellow at M.S. Merian – R. Tagore International Centre of Advanced Studies 'Metamorphoses of the Political' (ICAS:MP) in Delhi and at the Max Weber Kolleg in Erfurt. At ETH, I teach courses that deal with the history of women and the body, technology and development, gender and science, citizenship and biopolitics in the age of colonialism, decolonisation and globalisation, in particular in Asia and Africa.

Research projects

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