Deana Heath

Professor Deana Heath

Mid-Career Fellow 2017-18, Small Group Project 2017

Colonial Terror: Torture, Violence and the Unmaking of the World

This project will bring two disparate literatures together, namely scholarship on violence in colonial India and sociological research on violence, to consider the connections between forms of violence that are overt and perpetrated by identifiable agents – such as torture – and structural forms of violence in which the effects are not always visible and there are no clear perpetrators. It focuses, firstly, on the torturers themselves, who while agents of violence were also victims of it, since they generally came from the lowest social and economic strata of Indian society – from the strata most affected, in other words, by the structural violence of colonialism.

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The ‘Civilising’ Violence of Colonialism: Indian Experiences and Legacies

This research group will bring together an interdisciplinary group of eight historians, English scholars and Museology scholars for a week-long workshop (to be held in Cambridge) on the structural, social and symbolic violence of colonialism in Britain’s largest and most culturally iconic colony, India. While there is an emerging body of scholarship on what Slavoj Žižek (2008) terms “objective” violence in India and other colonial contexts scholars have yet to develop a comprehensive understanding of the nature of colonial violence, particularly the nature of “objective” violence and the relationship between “objective” violence, which largely remains hidden, and “subjective”, or overtly visible forms.

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Research outcomes

Heath, D. (2024).

Dunki: what this new Bollywood film tells us about the imperial history of the UK’s immigration system. The Conversation

Heath, D. (2021).

Colonial terror: Torture and state violence in colonial India. Oxford University Press.

Heath, D. (2017).

India’s torture record is dire – but Britain has little to crow about. The Conversation

Areas of interest

Colonial History Coloniality Imperialism India Settler Colonialism Cultural History Power Colonial Violence Environment

Cohort

MCF3 RRG2

Biography

Deana was raised in both the U.K. and U.S. and received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. Thereafter she taught at institutions in the U.S., Ireland and Canada, and held research fellowships in India and Australia. Deana speaks Hindi and is a lover of most things Indian. Deana is a scholar of British imperialism and colonialism, with a particular focus on India and the violence of empire - especially on the body and embodied forms of violence (including torture and sexual violence); gender and masculinity; pain and trauma; the state and sovereign power; law; biopolitics and governmentality; and necropolitics and bare life - as well as the legacies of this.

Her publications include Purifying Empire: Obscenity and the Politics of Moral Regulation in Britain, India and Australia (Cambridge, 2010), Communalism and Globalisation: South Asian Perspectives (co-edited with Chandana Mathur; Routledge, 2011), South Asian Governmentalities: Michel Foucault and Postcolonial Orderings (co-edited with fellow former ISRF fellow Stephen Legg; Cambridge, 2018), Colonial Terror: Torture and State Violence in Colonial India (Oxford, 2021; 2025), and Policing and Violence in India: Origins, Nature, Resistance (co-edited with Jinee Lokaneeta, Speaking Tiger). She is currently working on two research projects: one, ENLIvEN (Empire, Nature and Liverpool: Investigating and Engaging with Natural History) is on the role of Liverpool as an imperial hub for the global trade in plants and animals in the 19th-20th centuries, and the impact this has on Liverpool, its people and its environment and the other is on sexual violence as a tool of colonial power in India.

Biographical details correct as of 20.05.26