Dr Jayita Sarkar

Nominated Fellow
Dr Jayita Sarkar

Dr Jayita Sarkar

Nominated Fellow, June - August 2022

Home Institution: Boston University (until June 2022); University of Glasgow (from July 2022)

Dr Jayita Sarkar is a Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow. Her research specialisation is in global South Asia, connected partitions, global histories of capitalism, and nuclear technologies. She is the author of Ploughshares and Swords: India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2022). The book examines India’s nuclear programme (1940s-1980s) through the prisms of technopolitics and territoriality to show how nuclear and space technologies served technopolitical aims of economic modernity and geopolitical goals of deterring adversaries, with consequences for democratic accountability.

Project Title: Partition Machine: From South Asia to the World

At IASH, Dr Sarkar will be making progress on her next book project entitled Partition Machine: From South Asia to the World. It is a study of entangled social, economic, and political histories of partitions from the 1900s to the 1970s. By focusing on stateless people, it investigates the travel itinerary of territorial divisions from the borderlands of Bengal-Burma and Afghanistan-Pakistan to the League of Nations and the United Nations, and thereby to the world.