Devyani Aggarwal

Devyani is a History and French major in her senior year at Yale College. She will be heading to Cambridge next year for a MPhil degree, after which she plans to pursue a career in international law and diplomacy. Through her senior project in history, Devyani explored the lives of British India’s forgotten princesses, the Maharanis. Her work attempted to reverse the “imperial” gaze: instead of emphasizing the well-known fascination of the Western man with exotic Asian aesthetics, she chose to reveal the contrary power dynamic by studying the Indian woman’s connoisseurship of Western objects and ideas. She plans to use the WFF seed grant to present and develop her findings on colonial politics and is currently conceptualizing a book based on her thesis.