Joya Chatterji


Joya Chatterji is Professor of South Asian History and a Fellow of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. She specialises in modern south Asian history and is the editor of the journal Modern Asian Studies.

Education

Chatterji has a degree in history from Lady Sri Ram College of the University of Delhi, and a Ph.D. from Cambridge. Her doctoral thesis title was "Communal politics and the partition of Bengal, 1932-1947".

Career

She taught at the London School of Economics from 2000 until taking up her post in Cambridge. While there she worked with Claire Alexander and Annu Jalais on researching the experience of Bengali Muslim migrants, leading to their book The Bengal Diaspora. Rethinking Muslim Migration and the Bangla Stories project.
Since 2007 she has been Professor of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge, and was also for some time Director of the university's Centre of South Asian Studies. Her research interests are listed as "Modern South Asian history; imperial and world history; partitions and borders; refugees, migration and diaspora; mobility and immobility; citizenship and minority formation in the late 20th century", and she has supervised some 25 doctoral theses in these areas. She teaches courses on South Asian and world history at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, her courses including "The History of the Indian subcontinent from the late eighteenth century to the present day" and "World History since 1914".
Since 2009 she has been the editor of Modern Asian Studies and she is on the editorial boards of The Historical Journal, Journal of Contemporary History and Economic and Political Weekly.
She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2018, and is also a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and of the Royal Historical Society.

Personal life

Chatterji was born and brought up in Delhi, India. She has a son born in 1991 and brought him up as a single parent from 1997. In 2012 she was diagnosed with a "serious, incurable and disabling illness" but as of 2018 the university web site reports that "Her brilliant team of doctors try to persuade her to ‘pace herself’. For the most part, she ignores their advice."

Selected publications