Research Seminar: Durba Mitra

The Future That Was: A History of Third World Feminism Against Authoritarianism

This talk offers a glimpse into the vast intellectual history of Third World feminisms in the decolonizing world in the 1970s and 1980s. I critically engage the possibilities and limits of the feminist epistemological revolution that emerged in the fractured aftermath of an earlier era of utopian internationalism, solidarity, and non-alignment. Feminists reinvented the Third World, creating a new internationalist imaginary in response to widespread disenchantment with the nationalist project and rising neocolonial governance. Women seized the means of knowledge production and built a new world of research on women with radically just visions of the future.

Durba Mitra Stanley Kelley Jr. Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton University. She is a feminist historian and theorist whose scholarship brings together women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and global intellectual history. She is the author of The Future That Was: A History of Third World Feminism Against Authoritarianism (Princeton University Press, 2026), which reveals how Third World feminism transformed twentieth-century political thought, and the award-winning Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought (Princeton University Press, 2020), on sexuality and the modern social sciences. Her scholarship and public writing have appeared in Signs, South Atlantic Quarterly, Feminist Studies, Harper’s Bazaar, and Public Books.