Jayita Sarkar is an Assistant Professor at Boston University's Pardee School of Global Studies, where she teaches diplomatic and political history. Her expertise is in 20th century South Asia, history of U.S. foreign relations, nuclear technologies, and connected partitions. Her prize-winning research has been published in the Journal of Cold War Studies, Cold War History, International History Review, Journal of Strategic Studies, Nonproliferation Review, and elsewhere. She is also the founding director of the Global Decolonization Initiative at BU's Pardee School.
In 2020-21, she is on sabbatical from Boston University to make progress on her second book project as a Weatherhead Initiative on Global History Fellow and an Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy at Harvard University. This project entitled, “Light Water Capitalism: The Rise and Fall of U.S. Global Power,” examines the U.S. government’s export of light water reactors from the 1950s to the 1980s to expand its global power through nonproliferation.
Her first book, Ploughshares & Swords: India's Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War, examines the first forty years of India's nuclear program through the prisms of geopolitics and technopolitics. It is under contract to be published with Cornell University Press.
She is also pursuing a new project on the global intellectual history of partitions from the 1900s to the 1980s, with particular emphasis on partition violence, its causes, processes, and afterlives.
Born in Calcutta, India, she obtained her doctorate in History from the Graduate Institute Geneva in Switzerland. She has held prestigious fellowships such as the Albert Gallatin Fellowship in International Affairs at Yale, Stanton Nuclear Security Fellowship at Harvard, and the Niehaus Fellowship in U.S. Foreign Policy and International Security at Dartmouth College.
She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts with her spouse and two cats, Gorky and Grieg.