Profile

Gunja SenGupta's current research and teaching interests lie in 19th-century U.S. and slavery/abolition/empire in the Indian Ocean world; race, gender, poverty, and social welfare; sectional conflict; Afro-Asian interactions in the North Atlantic; and Black Atlantic history on film.

Her first book, For God and Mammon: Evangelicals and Entrepreneurs, Masters and Slaves in Territorial Kansas (1996), dealt with sectional conflict and consensus. In From Slavery to Poverty: The Racial Origins of Welfare in New York, 1840-1918 (2009), she explored welfare debates as sites for negotiating identities of class, race, gender, and nation. Her third (co-authored) book, Sojourners, Sultans, and Slaves: America and the Indian Ocean in the Age of Abolition and Empire, is forthcoming from the University of California Press in 2023. It fleshes out on a granular level, the interface among the personal, domestic, and international politics of slavery by tracking the circulation of people, the echo of ideas, and the resonance of policy among nodes of commercial exchange, imperial power rivalries, and reform activism, extending from Anglo-America through the Swahili coast, the Red Sea and the Gulf into the South Asian subcontinent.

Her fellowships and grants include those awarded by Mrs. Giles Whiting, Wolfe, Tow, Mellon, and most recently BRESI-CUNY (among others). Her articles have appeared in numerous journals including the American Historical Review, Journal of Negro (now African American) History, Civil War History, Kansas History, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, and Transition Magazine.