Jayita Sarkar is Assistant Professor at Boston University's Pardee School of Global Studies, where she teaches political and diplomatic 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.
Her first book manuscript, Ploughshares & Swords, examines the first forty years of India's nuclear program through the prisms of geopolitics and technopolitics. Concurrently, she has two ongoing single-authored book-length projects: one, on the U.S. government's export of light water reactors from the 1950s to the 1980s to expand its global power through nonproliferation, and the other, on the global intellectual history of partitions from the 1900s to the 1970s, with particular emphasis on the Bengal-Burma frontier.
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.