Jayita Sarkar will be Associate Professor of Economic & Social History at the University of Glasgow from July 2022. She is a tenure-track Assistant Professor of International Relations at Boston University until June 2022. A historian of the late 19^th century to the present, her research and teaching areas are connected partitions, decolonisation, 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, forthcoming, July 2022, 300pp., paperback) examines India’s nuclear and space programs from the 1940s to the 1980s through the prisms of technopolitics and territoriality. It shows how the programs served goals of economic modernity and geopolitics, with consequences for democratic accountability.

 

Currently, she is working on two book manuscripts. Atomic Capitalism. A Global History explores the role of corporations and governments in land expropriation, labor exploitation, and debt generation from the 1890s to the 2000s through mining, explosions, energy, and waste sites of nuclear infrastructures. In 2020-21, she was a visiting fellow at Harvard University's Weatherhead Initiative on Global History and an Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy to make progress on Atomic Capitalism.

 

Partition Machine. From South Asia to the World is a study of entangled social, economic, and political histories of partitions from the 1890s to the 1970s. By focusing on stateless people, it investigates the travel itinerary of the idea and practice of territorial divisions from the borderlands of South Asia to the world. In the summer of 2022, she will be a nominated fellow at the University of Edinburgh's Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities to make progress on Partition Machine.

 

She holds a PhD 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.