Mou Banerjee received her PhD from Harvard University in 2018, where she recently received the Harold K. Gross award, which is granted annually by the faculty of the History department to the graduate student whose dissertation ‘gave greatest promise of a distinguished career of historical research.'

Her research explores the dialogues and debates of Indian intellectuals with evangelical Protestant Christianity and missionaries in the nineteenth century, especially in the Bengal Presidency in India. In her analysis of these debates, Banerjee charts the development of a complex relationship of overt repudiation and covert fascination, where Christianity was perceived as a religion and a philosophy, a discursive and dialectical category, a denominator of racial and social difference, and as a repository of Enlightenment ethos and modernity. Banerjee investigates the way in which this examination of Christianity represents a philosophical engagement, leading to contestation over the nature of faith's socio-political implications, and of the political responsibility of the colonized subjects.