Maria Misra is Lecturer in Modern History at Oxford University and a Fellow of Keble College Oxford. She presented a television series, called An Indian Affair, which was broadcast on Channel 4. She is also the author of Business, Race and Politics in British India.

Dr Misra has written on the politics, culture and economics of nineteenth and twentieth-century imperialism and colonialism. She is currently writing a new history of modern India for Penguin. Her broader interests lie in the comparative impact of colonial ideas and ideologies on post-colonial Asia.