An Ayah in New York: Professor Haskins awarded Distinguished Visiting Scholar Fellowship at New York’s City University

Along with their East Asian counterparts, known as amahs, these remarkable women are the subject of a major research project funded by the Australian Research Council and led by Purai Global Indigenous History Centre's co-Director and historian Professor Victoria Haskins, with Professor Swapna Banerjee (City University of New York) and Associate Professor Claire Lowrie (University of Wollongong).

Now, Haskins’ interconnected project, An Ayah in New York: Representing Empire in US Cultural History, has earned her a prestigious Distinguished Visiting Fellowship in 2022 and 2023, from the Advanced Research Collaborative of the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY).

Expanding the scope beyond imperial Britain, Haskins aims to trace the multifaceted representations of the Ayah as a transnational symbol of imperialism within the United States of America.

Professor Banerjee, a Purai external affiliate and a longstanding collaborator with Haskins, has also been awarded a Distinguished Fellowship with the Research Collaborative.

They will be taking up their fellowships concurrently in the 2023 Summer Term.

Banerjee’s project, Locating Ayahs in Transit, will map the early female caregivers in the complex labyrinth of connected, transnational histories, juxtaposing the ayahs’ life-worlds in their native home and the empire.

CUNY’s Graduate Center’s Advanced Research Collaborative provides Professors Haskins and Banerjee with the unique opportunity to share their research findings and methods with an international community of scholars pursing independent intellectual interests around the research theme of Race, Migration, and Diversity.

It will deepen the connections between the University of Newcastle’s (UoN) Purai Global Indigenous History Centre, and CUNY’s Graduate Center.

As a South Asianist at Brooklyn College and CUNY’s Graduate Center, Professor Banerjee’s expertise lies in domestic and family history in colonial India with special focus on servants, children, and subalterns.

Professor Haskins, a historian in UoN's School of Humanities, Creative Industries and Social Sciences is a leading scholar of domestic service and colonisation, specialising in work that focuses upon the significance of relations in the home and household for shaping larger race and cross-cultural relationships in settler colonial nations.

Together they will work closely to trace the circulation of images of the Ayah to and within the USA, from the early 1800s through to the Second World War, and examine how these images continue to inform global understandings of race, gender and empire.

Now meet Joanna de Silva, a nursemaid from eighteenth-century Bengal, whose portrait now resides at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Who was this gorgeous compelling woman?