Monika -

Monika is a Cambridge Trust Scholar at the Institute of Criminology. She previously completed her M.Phil. and Masters degrees at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India, and holds a BA (Hons) from Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi. Her ongoing PhD research, tentatively titled Understanding Harms in 'Promise-to-Marry' Rape in India: Intimacies, Caste-Patriarchal Violence and the Law, presents a critique of consent-centric liberal understanding of rape harms. Her research intervenes in the fields of feminist legal studies and socio-legal work on domestic abuse, intimate violence and rape by re-conceptualising harms through dalit-feminist theoretical approaches to study promise-to-marry rape in India.  Monika uses ethnographic methods, incorporating observations, conversations, interviews and document/discourse analysis in her research. Her nine-month (discontinuous) fieldwork in Delhi, India (2024-25) was supported by the Institute of Criminology Fieldwork Grant, Smuts Memorial Student Research Grant (Fieldwork), and the Gulbenkian Yuval Cambridge International Studentship based at Churchill College. She is a member of the Justice & Society Research Centre at the Institute of Criminology and the Gender & Sexuality Research Cluster at the Department of Sociology. 
 
Monika was previously a Junior Research Fellow (funded by the University Grants Commission, Government of India) at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India (2020-2023). She has worked as a Research Consultant with Jagori, a grassroot women’s organisation in Delhi, on several projects addressing sexual and gender-based violence. She has also served as a Teaching Fellow at the College of Law, Anthropology and Politics at SOAS (Lent, 2024-25), and currently supervises undergraduate students on courses in Criminology and Criminal Justice, and Sociology of Gender, at the University of Cambridge. Monika is also working as an Assistant Editor at the Indian Law Review (Taylor & Francis).