Antara Datta
antaradatta.bsky.social
Antara Datta
@antaradatta.bsky.social
Historian of South Asia. Refugees, Migration and Borders.
Reposted by Antara Datta
In recent years, Jinal Parekh and @antaradatta.bsky.social have published on aspects of the ‘virginity testing’ practice that had not been studied explored yet. For example, they wrote about the Indian response in this article for @globalhistjnl.bsky.social

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
India, the United Nations Human Rights Commission, and the 1979 Virginity Testing Scandal | Journal of Global History | Cambridge Core
India, the United Nations Human Rights Commission, and the 1979 Virginity Testing Scandal - Volume 19 Issue 1
www.cambridge.org
February 1, 2026 at 9:57 AM
Shame on all those news channel that would quote the death tolls with the caveat: ‘according to the Hamas controlled Gaza Health Ministry’ to cast doubt.
January 29, 2026 at 4:20 PM
The teenager who once asked me if I had ‘ever heard of a cricketer called Rahul Dravid’ has also just asked me if I’d heard of the Weimar Republic…?!
January 14, 2026 at 6:45 PM
A colleague introduced me to Gill Sans MT and now it’s my default font on Word. I think it’s both pretty and readable.
January 5, 2026 at 6:50 PM
Like with everything else it sort of depends on the baby. One of mine would have loved it, the other would have hated it.
December 23, 2025 at 11:05 AM
After my time. My friends have sworn by it. And in the newborn phase it has helped them a lot. It is also mega bucks so…(my most expensive purchase was my lightweight Bugaboo and frankly we used it every single day for both kids…).
December 23, 2025 at 11:03 AM
Reposted by Antara Datta
Very sad that I felt I had no choice but to resign from The Infinite Monkey Cage - a victory for the transphobes and other bigots - I did it because so much of the media has chosen to believe the kind and empathetic people are a fiction - they are real and so often unrepresented.
December 13, 2025 at 12:02 AM
Reposted by Antara Datta
If handing someone their arse, was a video clip
December 12, 2025 at 8:12 AM
Reposted by Antara Datta
Excited our department seminar tomorrow is @duncanbell.bsky.social on #Socialism and #Telepathy: Group Minds and Freedom in Interwar British Political Thought. The talk takes place 1-2pm in McCrea 2-01, all welcome.
November 18, 2025 at 3:12 PM
Apparently my copy is on the way! Congratulations @kalathmika.bsky.social!
My book Coolie Migrants, Indian Diplomacy is out with @hurstpublishers.bsky.social. It has been shaped by the support of a great community of scholars - grateful for generous endorsements from
@rahulraothariel.bsky.social @katesde.bsky.social @kalramnath.bsky.social

Order here - shorturl.at/55NjW
November 4, 2025 at 2:12 PM
In NICUs we generally don’t stay overnight. We could visit any time we wanted though in the two hospitals we were in. Funnily enough he’s now 8 (and absolutely fine- all hail modern medicine) and still hates bed sharing…🤣
October 13, 2025 at 1:45 PM
You have to stay and sleep with your child in the general paeds wards and despite the generally excellent care, it is usually hell. (Not to mention that you have a sick child…).
October 13, 2025 at 1:33 PM
Yes so again pumps are available but we often have to rent hospital grade ones (I did). And yes there are chairs but sitting in those for hours is impossible. I’ll be honest and say I have found the NICUs to be relatively better equipped than the paeds wards.
October 13, 2025 at 1:30 PM
As a former NICU mum of a 26 weeker, a lot of the money we raise provides for what I suppose are deemed extras- incubator blankets, parents’ coffee rooms, nicer reclining chairs for breastfeeding etc.
October 13, 2025 at 10:06 AM
Reposted by Antara Datta
New on advance access: "Air Travel, Statelessness, and the Rights Claims of Ugandan Asians, c.1973"

by @riakapoor.bsky.social (@qmul.bsky.social)

#OpenAccess

doi.org/10.1093/past...
Validate User
doi.org
October 10, 2025 at 8:58 AM
And also helped me think through something I am writing about repatriation at the end of WW2 and thinking through the state’s intransigence versus the refugees’ creative use of their circumstances.
October 12, 2025 at 8:00 AM
I read it yesterday and really enjoyed it. Particularly the contrast between the state’s pejorative view of queue jumpers and ‘shuttlecocking’ versus how the displaced saw these as opportunities.
October 12, 2025 at 7:59 AM
Reposted by Antara Datta
UK universities claim to be reckoning with their imperial and colonial pasts, but refuse to see their implication in the genocidal settler colonialism of the present – so how serious are these exercises? wrote about this for @versobooks.bsky.social blog

www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/...
Race Reports
In July 2025, the University of Edinburgh published a wide-ranging ‘Review of Race and History’ that attempts to confront its legacies of enslavement and colonialism. Four months earlier, the Universi...
www.versobooks.com
October 8, 2025 at 9:39 AM
Reposted by Antara Datta
🚨Hiring a fully funded (3.5 years) PhD for the @ldnsocmedobs.bsky.social to research social media and politics. Candidates should have quantitative/computational skills and/or be interested in content curation/moderation. UK home candidates only unfortunately. www.royalholloway.ac.uk/media/hquftp...
www.royalholloway.ac.uk
September 29, 2025 at 5:21 PM
A superb special issue on caste and Indian diplomacy. Well done @kalathmika.bsky.social and the other editors! brill.com/view/journal...
brill.com
September 21, 2025 at 6:48 PM
I have. I did a single seminar for PhD students. For organisation I showed them what my practice was in a very granular step by step way. And took suggestions from them (younger, technically more competent?) about what I could do better. Or how they would improve my practice.
September 19, 2025 at 12:47 PM
Congratulations to my lovely colleague Andreu @andreucasas.bsky.social on his fellowship- keep an eye on all the stuff he’s going to be doing!
🚨Very honored to receive the Future Leaders Fellowship from @ukri.org I’ll use this 2.3 million £ investment to create the London Social Media Observatory, for cutting-edge research on social media and politics, and novel computational tools for social science research. www.ukri.org/news/ukri-an...
September 16, 2025 at 2:04 PM
Reposted by Antara Datta
‘The conditions in the hotels are very bad: most residents share rooms with complete strangers, have no laundry or cooking facilities, no choice about when or what they eat, with any visits strictly policed by security.’

Helen Charman on ‘our girls’ vs asylum hotels: www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/se...
Helen Charman | Of Flags and Families
The new home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, said in May (in an interview with Michael Gove for the Spectator) that she has...
www.lrb.co.uk
September 9, 2025 at 4:50 PM
Come to our lovely campus to hear about how @danielalai.bsky.social, Will Jones, Ibrahim Halawi and Mohammad Kalantari and I have been re-designing our ‘intro to IR’ class over the last five years.
August 5, 2025 at 9:12 AM
I once got asked for it by an officious bus driver when my younger one wasn’t even six. She kept saying: how do I know he isn’t 11? Because he’s half the size of his brother who is 10????! But to be fair that was the only time…
August 4, 2025 at 9:48 AM