Dr. Hayden Bellenoit is a professor of history at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD. He is a legal and social historian of modern South Asia. His research focuses on colonial state formation, the histories of scribal communities, and the broader impact of colonial legal systems upon Indian social, religious, and cultural traditions. Dr. Bellenoit received his MA from Wheaton College and his DPhil in modern history from Oxford University. At the Naval Academy, he teaches courses on modern India and Pakistan. He has also been a visiting fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge University, where he is a life member.
Dr. Bellenoit is the author of two books: Missionary Education and Empire in Late Colonial India, 1860–1920 (2007); and The Formation of the Colonial State in India: Scribes, Paper and Taxes, 1760–1860 (2017). His articles have appeared in top peer-reviewed academic journals such as Modern Asian Studies, Law and History Review, South Asian History and Culture, and Indian Law Review. He is currently completing an article on how Mughal-era legal customs were read into the codification of Hindu property law and inheritance.
For his Fulbright-Nehru project, Dr. Bellenoit is conducting research for his third book, “Judges, Case Law and Jurisprudence: The Legal Construction of Caste in India, c. 1830–1950”. This will be the first book to fully address the question of modern constructions of caste/social hierarchy in India as a result of the broader phenomena of colonial law. It will carefully examine how colonial case law, the training of Indian judges and lawyers, and the resultant jurisprudence, all broadly combined to shape modern understandings about the relationship between caste and law.