Dr Sonia Wigh

Sonia Wigh is a British Academy Postdoctoral fellow at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. She received the C.A. Bayly Best Dissertation Award (2022) for her thesis 'A Body of Words: A Social History of Sex and the Body in Early Modern South Asia', submitted to the University of Exeter. She held a short postdoctoral position at the University of Edinburgh to work on a project titled 'Pleasure in a Jar: Personal Care Pharmacology in Early Modern South Asia' under the aegis of Prof Jill Burke's 'Renaissance Goo: Historic Personal Care Recipes and Soft Matter Science' project. Her research focuses on the history of sexuality, medicine, and body in early modern South Asia. She is currently the Editorial Assistant for Osiris.

Current project:
Sex, Medicine, and Manuscripts in Early Colonial South Asia (1750–1857)

This project is the first history of the medicalisation of sex in south Asia through a critical study of numerous Persian sexual-medical manuscripts produced between 1750 and 1857. The consumption of sexual-medical knowledge encapsulated in these texts shaped people's experiences of their bodies and sexual being. Current historiography traces 'modern' sexual ethos to the colonial states' establishment and the accompanying spread of print technology. Instead, I will argue that 'native' actors (usually physicians) drove the establishment of medical authority over sexual experiences and sensations. By using prosopography and source-critical methods, I demonstrate that it was not print but manuscripts that were the receptacles of the transforming language of sexual medicine. By situating these texts within the pre-existing yet distinctive Indo-Persian forms of 'Science of sex', my project will de-centralise and de-westernise the study of sexuality and broaden our understanding of how sexual and gender identities were performed, narrated, and contested.

Research interests

History of medicine, South Asia, multilingualism, codicology, and the art of translation.