Gaiutra Bahadur, NF ’08, has been named a Sheila Biddle Ford Fellow at the Du Bois Research Institute, part of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research.

She will spend the 2016-2017 academic year at the Harvard institution working on a biography of Janet Rosenberg Jagan, an American whose Marxist views powered her controversial political career. Jagan was the first American woman to serve as a head of state when she became prime minister of Guyana in 1997. She later succeeded her husband to become the first female president of the South American country.

It will be Bahadur’s second book; the University of Chicago Press published her first, “Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture,” about her great-grandmother, in 2013. She wrote about her work on the book in the 2011 Nieman Reports article “Writing a Life, Living a Writer’s Life.”