Kalpana Iyer Mohanty

Kalpana Iyer Mohanty is a first-year PhD candidate in History at Harvard University. Kalpana feels a strong commitment to making research accessible to those outside academia and affecting positive change in policy through scholarship. She grew up in Portugal, Canada, and India, and this has both shaped her ability to connect with people from a variety of backgrounds, as well as given her a facility for languages. She finished her undergraduate degree in History at Barnard College of Columbia University cum laude, followed by an MPhil in South Asian studies at Cambridge University as a Snowdon Scholar. Her PhD topic focuses on the history of disability in South Asia during high colonialism which was sparked by her own experiences as a woman of South Asian origin with a disability. Kalpana’s other research interests include race, gender, colonialism and the history of medicine. She is excited to see how her research can help shape a multicultural country like Canada.