Profile
Biography
Doctor, BA (York), MA (York), PhD (Cantab)
Mobeen Hussain is an early career historian of the British Empire and the colonial legacies of consumption, material and literary cultures, and economic exploitation. Her expertise lies in race, caste, gender, medicine, and corporeal consumption in South Asia. She undertook a PhD in History at the University of Cambridge. She was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on Trinity College Dublin’s Colonial Legacies project and a Junior Research Fellow at University College, Oxford before joining York.
Research
Overview
Mobeen is currently writing her first book, Performing Fairness on race and racialisation, gender, colourism, embodiment, and skin-lightening in colonial India. She also works on legacies issues, public history, and the practices of archive formation and collecting. She is a visiting fellow on Trinity College Dublin’s Colonial legacies project researching transnational histories of enslavement, colonial governance and surveying, and cultures of knowledge-formation and collecting in Ireland, India, South Africa, and the Caribbean. Mobeen is a co-author of a monograph in preparation about Trinity’s colonial legacies.
Mobeen has also commenced a new history of medicine project on ‘Women and Unani Tibb: Targets and Transmitters of Plural Health Systems c.1910-1970’. This project, funded by a Wellcome Early Career Research Award, investigates how Indian women interacted with Unani Tibb (a medical system with Greco-Arabic origins) in Bhopal, Punjab, and across Northern India via print culture and professional practice.
Publications
Full publications list
Books in Progress:
Cultivating Virtue? Trinity’s Colonial Legacies (lead author, co-authored monograph with Ciaran O’Neill and Patrick Walsh).
Performing Fairness: Skin-lightening, Race, and Beauty in Colonial India c.1900-1950 (under review with Cambridge University Press)
Articles:
‘Hakims on Health and Hygiene: Advising Women and Optimising Reproductive Capacity in Urdu Instructional Literature, c.1880s-1940s,’ Social History of Medicine (forthcoming 2024).
‘Roundtable: Four Nations,’ with Shahmima Akhtar, Erika Hanna, Peter Hession, Krishan Kumar, Naomi Lloyd-Jones, Jane Ohlmeyer, and Ian Stewart, Modern British History, 35:1, pp.30-48, (2024).
‘Uprooted in the “Postcolonial” Moment: Attia Hosain’s No New Lands, No New Seas,’ Wasafiri, 39:1, pp.48-56, (2024).
‘Marketing Modernity, Selling Hazeline: A Comparative Study of Indian and Chinese Markets 1908-1957,’ co-written with Dr Yushu Geng, Historical Journal, 67:2 (2023), pp.305-338.
‘Combining Global Expertise with Local Knowledge in Colonial India: Selling Ideals of Beauty and Health in Commodity Advertising (c.1900-1949),’ South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 44:5 (2021), pp.926-947.
Book Chapters:
‘Contending with Coloniality and Commemoration at Trinity College Dublin: Futures of Memorialisation in Ireland and Britain,’ Tomás Irish, Simon John and Hannah Lyons (Eds), International Perspectives on the Past, Present and Future of Public Monuments, London: Bloomsbury Academic, ( forthcoming 2025) .
‘Training, Surveying, Investment, and Capital: Trinity-Men, Railway Infrastructure, and Circuits of Knowledge across Ireland and India,’ Colonising and Decolonising Nineteenth Century Ireland, Chris Cusack and Lindsay Janssen (eds), Liverpool University Press (forthcoming 2025).
Food Myths and Unani-Influenced Medicine,’ Forgotten Foods: Memories and Recipes from Muslim South Asia, Tarana Husain Khan, Siobhan Lambert-Hurley & Claire Chambers (eds), Pan MacMillan (2023), pp.128-135.
‘Black, Beautiful and Essentially British: African-Caribbean women, Belonging, and the Creation of Black British Beauty Spaces in Britain (c.1948-1990),’ Josh Doble, Liam Liburd & Emma Parker (eds), British Culture After Empire: Migration, Race and Decolonisation, 1945-Present, Manchester University Press (2023), pp.207-229.
‘Sunlight on a Broken Column and The Heart Divided as Autobiographically-Inspired Realist Texts: Navigating Gendered Socio-political Identities in Genre Fiction,’ Haris Qadeer & Yasser Arafath (eds), Sultana's Sisters: Gender, Genre and Genealogy in South Asian Muslim Women's Fiction, Routledge (2021), pp.160-176.
‘Trinity’s Colonial Legacies: Transparency, instrumentality, and Agency in an Engaged Research Project,’ (co-authored with Ciaran O’Neill and Patrick Walsh), Dealing with Complex Heritage: Revisiting University Pasts in Contemporary Practice, Peter Bille Larsen, Markéta Křížová, and Gertjan Plets (Eds), Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (forthcoming 2025).
Selected Online Publications:
‘“Lovely” Housewives and Glamorous “Modern” Girls: Cosmetics Advertising in India, 1920s-1950s,’ Critical Collective India (Dec 2023).
‘South Asian Women Re-Imagine Public Space,’ Global Feminisms, History Workshop (May 2023).
‘Beauty and the Bleach: the colonial history of colourism explored in BBC documentary,’ The Conversation (May 2022). [Approached to commentate]
‘How Urdu domestic manuals in the 1900s taught Indian women to be fair and lovely,’ Forgotten Food series, Scroll (Oct 2021).
Selected Book Reviews:
‘A Most Noble Life: The Biography of Ashrafunnisa Begum (1840-1903) by Muhammadi Begum (1877–1908), Translated from the original Urdu, with additional material, by C.M. Naim,’ Journal of Urdu Studies, 3:1-2 (2023) pp.173-178.
‘Beneath the Surface: A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners,’ Oral History Journal (2022).
‘Elusive lives: gender, autobiography, and the self in Muslim South Asia,’ Women's History Review 29:3 (2019).
‘The Indian ladies’ magazine, 1901–1938: from Raj to Swaraj,’ Women's History Review 28:1 (2019).
