Women and the Court is an initiative to bring together two fields that are commonly treated as distinct areas of scholarship, legal studies and court studies. This initiative unites scholars, from across disciplines, working on women’s voices during the early modern and modern periods of South Asian history. The project seeks to uncover women’s imaginaries of the court that challenged, negotiated, or reformulated sovereign authorities. Women and the Court aims to understand how different women shaped the court and policies in creative ways, and thus produced unexpected geographies of power.  

The organizing committee is delighted to welcome scholars from across South Asia, North America and Europe to the first gathering of the project – the conference Women and the Court: Space, Time and Power – that will be held at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, on 7-8 December 2023.