Priyanka Zylstra (History) is a 2025–2026 HRI Graduate Fellow. Her current research project, “‘It was called Liberation’: South Asian Women’s Activism in Multi-Racial Britain, 1979–1994,” examines how South Asian women in Britain during the 1970s–80s resisted racialized and gendered state violence.
Learn more about HRI’s Campus Fellowship Program, which supports a cohort of faculty and graduate students through a year of dedicated research and writing in a collaborative, interdisciplinary environment.
What is unique about your research on this topic?
My research looks at how South Asian women navigated different forms of oppression in 1970s and 1980s Britain. Many of these women faced racist immigration practices, labor exploitation, and (like women in all communities) issues of gender-based violence within their own families. I examine how activists from South Asian diasporic communities resisted these various forms of violence through campaigns, protests, and the creation of community groups. Throughout these efforts, I study how Asian women worked with Black British women. Specifically, I look at how Asian and Black women practiced solidarity, the challenges they faced putting the principles of solidarity into practice, and how solidarity has important historical contexts. Existing scholarship rarely brings these different campaigns, protests, and efforts all together to look at shifting practices of solidarity.
What drives your interest in this research?
As a historian of the British Empire, I should not have been surprised when I learned that British immigration officers subjected at least eighty South Asian women to “virginity tests” when they tried to migrate to Britain in the 1970s. Still, I was appalled. I began looking into the history of these virginity tests, and I found was that these tests were part of a larger story of state violence and oppression that Asian women faced in the United Kingdom. As I examine different forms of oppression and violence, I am motivated to shift my focus away from the institutions and mechanisms of violence (as we have scholarship that does this well), and instead I am drawn to understanding the different ways women of Asian descent responded to these violences. Given my own experiences as an activist and advocate, I am most interested in grassroots and community-based efforts to create better lives and futures in the face of such violences. Learning about the work of feminist and anti-racist activists in 1970s and 1980s Britain continues to amaze me, and I am invested in sharing those histories.
How has the fellowship seminar shaped the way you’re approaching your research?
Being a part of the Fellows Seminar has been a vital part of my dissertation writing experience. I struggle to write in isolation, but the seminar has offered a place of community throughout the writing process. Reading the work of others has helped me think about different writing approaches and modeled a way to engage with feedback. When I shared my chapter draft, the fellows offered feedback with care and consideration. Because the fellows have such a wide range of expertise and disciplinary training, the conversation helped me realize many different points of connection I could explore further. In particular, the seminar has helped me rethink my approach to and analysis of visual sources, something I have had less practice with. I feel so grateful to work with and alongside both graduate students and faculty who value interdisciplinary community.