Du Fei is a historian of early modern and modern South Asia, focusing on the history of gender and Islam in South Asia's global connections. Fei is currently completing his first book, Local Women, Global Histories?, which studies Muslim women’s participation in the local and transregional economic life that converged in India from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. Piecing together a wide array of archives in Persian, Arabic, English, and Dutch, this book argues that elite and sub-elite Muslim women from merchant and landholding households were not simply confined to the home and economically marginalized. Rather, they regularly negotiated with male kins, jurists, judges, and officials in seemingly mundane areas of Islamic law, especially inheritance and property management. Muslim women’s economic life thus defies any easy conceptions of patriarchy, as patriarchal regimes of agricultural production, trade, finance, and empire-making all relied on appropriating women’s capital and labor input.
A chapter of this book has been published as "Fatima’s Inheritance: Law, Islam, and Gendered Archive-Making in India’s Early Modern Global Connections" in Past & Present in 2024. More broadly, Fei's research interests include gender and sexuality, Islamic law, material history, history of knowledge, and digital humanities.
