Hia Sen

Assistant Professor

BA Sociology (Presidency College, 2005)

MA Sociology (Jawaharlal Nehru University, 2007)

M.Phil Sociology (Jawaharlal Nehru University, 2009)

PhD. Sociology (Albert-Ludwigs Universität, Freiburg, 2012)

My doctoral work at the Albert-Ludwigs University of Freiburg explored a middle-class culture of childhood in West Bengal where I sought to foreground children's accounts of their everyday, in order to extend Juergen Zinnecker's conceptualization of childhood as a Bildungsmoratorium. I completed my PhD. as an Erasmus Mundus scholar in 2012. In October 2012 I joined the Department of Sociology at Presidency University as an Assistant Professor. My key interests are in the fields of childhood studies, including the history of childhood, cultural production - especially literary production and in social inequalities. I adress some of these questions about culture, race, and class in my work that is usually centered on childhood.

I am currently working on a media history project, exploring children's interactive media in the 1940s. While the project funded by ICSSR has been completed, I am continuing to work on this field. I am simultaneously working on areas connected with cultural sociology. My research has largely been on  Childhood.  I have conducted an ICSSR funded research on how childhood is "performed" in theatre by child and non child actors. I am also interested in historically researching children's experiences. My doctoral work was on how the imagination of childhood as a 'time out' from adulthood relates to the lived experiences of childhood among the middle classes. I am also interested in exploring childhood as Bildungsmoratoria in other socio-historical contexts in India and in the experiences of growing up and its self-images before economic liberalization. I am the convener of the University Annual Report Committee from 2014. I was  joint convener of the University GenED Programme from 2015-2018, and am currently in the Student Services Centre, and the departmental PhD Committee.

I  teach a postgraduate course on the Sociology of Childhood which only introduces students to the conceptual debates on childhood, as well as perspectives from the history of childhood and focuses greatly on childhood in the Global South; Globalization and Indian Society is another optional I offer, where apart from engaging with standard scholarship on world systems, students are introduced to debates from global history, as well as those about the politics of knowledge production in global academia.

An undergraduate course I teach is  Qualitative Research Methods, where in addition to the conventional approaches to qualitative research, I also show students how to transcribe interviews and conversations. 

In the last few years my sessional courses have been focused on cultural production, including that on digital media platforms.

I have supervised over 50 postgraduate students working on: childhood, labour, creative industries, chronological age, urban neighbourhoods, trades, clubs and queer associations.

I am curently supervising three PhD students working on the homestay industry on the Cinchona plantation in Kalimpong, the waithood of Government exam aspirants, and the history of gaming practices in the Darjeeling Himalayas. 

Member of the Society for the History of Children and Youth from 2019-2024

Member of the Children's History Society - until 2025

Member of the CCYSC

Books

Sen, H. (2013). 'Time-Out' in the Land of Apu: Childhoods, Bildungsmoratorium and the Middle Classes of Urban West Bengal, Berlin. Springer, Vs Verlag Für Sozialwissenschaften.

Journal Article

2026 - ‘In Relief’: Individual Children in Relief and Rehabilitation Records of Late Colonial India. Childhood in the Past, 1-21.

2026 - Babel: Participatory media for children and its early travails in India, 1940–1950s. The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 63(2): 175-206.

2025 - Voyaging into a Christian World: Indian children and the Church Missionary Society’s project of world-making, 1920s–1940s. Journal of Global History. Published online 2025:1-19. 

2022 - Childhood, Youth, and Identity: A Roundtable Conversation  
From the Global South, (coauthored with Kannan, D., Dar, A., Duff, S., Sen, H., Nag, S., and Bergere, C.), Journal of Childhood Studies, 47(2): 20-31.

2020   ‘Producing’ Childhood: The making of childhood and children in theatre’, Childhood, vol. 28, no. 1: 72-85.

2014 - From Rabindra Sangit to Doraemon: Inheritance and Globalisation of Children’s Leisure Culture in Kolkata. In ASIEN: The German Journal on Contemporary Asia:Vol. 130. 24-41.

Article in Edited Volumes

(2024). The Dispersed Child: Indian Children and Their Archival Presence in Missionary Collections. In Abebe T, Dar A and Wells K (eds) Routledge Handbook of Childhood Studies and Global Development. London: Routledge, pp. 17-31.

Sen, H (2021)  Bengali daughter, Bengali Child: The roles and routes to understanding childhood, In Perez, R. and Fruzzeti, L. (eds). Transdisciplinary Ethnography in India, London: Routledge.Sen, H

(2018) “Chasing Pareto” In Chaudhuri, M & Thakur M. (eds) Doing Theory: Locations, Hierarchies and Disjunctions, New Delhi: Orient Blackswan.

Sen, H. (2016): Do the Mollycoddled Act? Children, Agency and disciplinary Entanglements in India In: Reconceptualising Agency and Childhood. New Perspectives in Childhood Studies, Eds, Esser, F., Baader, M., Betz, T. & Hungerland, B. London: Routledge, 197-210.

Sen, H. (2015): Halcyon Days ? Bengali Middle Class Childoods and tale of Transformation In :Changing India: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, Ed. Saalmann, G. New Delhi: Winshield Press.

Sen, H. (2013):Koloniale Soziale Arbeit: Die Thematisierung der Kindheit in Indien: In, “Weltatlas„ Soziale Arbeit – jenseits aller Vermessung, Eds, Homfeldt, H.G., Bähr, C., Schröder, C., Schröer, W., & Schweppe, C. (Ed):, Weinheim/München: BELTZ Juventa, 182-197.

Book Reviews 

2020  Book Review, Jill Sperandio, ‘Pioneering Education for Girls Across the Globe: Advocates and Entrepreneurs, 1742–1910’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 2020, 13 (3): pp. 483-485.

May  2022                   ‘Iridescent Yarn’, Review of “A Venetian At The Mughal Court: The Life and Adventures of Nicolo Manucci” by Marco Moneta, (New Delhi: Vintage), The Telegraph, India.

January 2022               ‘An Ark for the Deluge’, Review of  “Diary of a Young   Naturalist” by Dara McAnulty, (London: Penguin Random House), The Telegraph, India.

June 2021                    ‘Library and Afterlife’, Review of “The Paris Library” by Janet Skeslien Charles, (London: Two Roads), The Telegraph, India.

January 2021               ‘Fluid Forms’, Review of “The Death of Vivek Oji” by Akwaeke Emezi (London: Faber and Faber), The Telegraph, India.

September 2020           ‘Getting under the City’s Skin’, Review of “Uncivil City: Ecology, Equity and the Commons in Delhi” by Amita Baviskar (New Delhi: Sage), The Telegraph, India.

November 2019          ‘A Glimpse of Distinct Themes in a Vast, Woven Carpet’, Review of “Socioliterary Cultures in South Asia” by Anisur Rahman (New Delhi: Niyogi Books), The Telegraph, India.

Review of Anisur Rahman's Socioliterary Cultures in South Asia, The Telegraph, India, November 2019.

“Everyday Anxieties”, Review of Mahima Nayar’s Against All Odds: Psychosocial Distress and Healing among Women, The Telegraph, India, 22 June 2019.

“Life Beyond Pity and Shame”, Review of Sohaila Abdulali’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape, The Telegraph, India, 29 March 2019.

“No Azaadi for Dalit Agricultural Labourers”, Review of Anand Chakravarti’s Is this ‘Azaadi’? Everyday lives of Dalit agricultural labourers in a Bihar village, The Telegraph, India, 2 November 2018.

"Lens refocused", Review of Maitrayee Chaudhuri’s Refashioning India: Gender, Media and a Transformed Public Discourse, The Telegraph, India, 19 January 2018.

"Stoic Faces of Survival", Review of Kota Neelima’s Widows of Vidarbha: Making of Shadows, The Telegraph, Kolkata, 11 May 2018.