Jayita Sarkar is Associate Professor of Economic & Social History at the University of Glasgow and Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. Her research and teaching areas are connected partitions, decolonisation as a process, global histories of capitalism, and nuclear infrastructures.

 

Her first book, Ploughshares and Swords. India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2022, 300 pp. $24.95, paperback) examines India’s nuclear and space programmes from the 1940s to the 1980s through the prisms of technopolitics and territoriality. It shows how the programmes served goals of economic modernity and geopolitics with consequences for democratic accountability.

 

She is completing her second book, Atomic Capitalism. A Global History (under contract with Princeton University Press). The monograph explores the role of corporations and governments in land expropriation, labor exploitation, and debt generation from the 1890s to the 1990s through mining, explosions, and energy sites of nuclear infrastructures.

 

Concurrently, she is conducting research for her next book, Partition Machine. From South Asia to the World. It is a study of entangled social, economic, and political histories of partitions from the 1890s to the 1970s. By focusing on stateless people, the book traces the travel itinerary of the idea and practice of territorial divisions from the borderlands of South Asia to the world.

 

She holds a Ph.D. in History from the Graduate Institute Geneva in Switzerland and an MRes. in Sociology from the University of Paris IV-Sorbonne in France. She was born and raised in Calcutta, India, and lived and worked in the northeastern United States for nearly a decade before relocating to Scotland. She lives in Edinburgh with her spouse and two cats.