Jayita Sarkar

Jayita Sarkar
Born	Calcutta, India
Citizenship	American
Occupation	Academic
Academic background
Education	Geneva Graduate Institute Paris-Sorbonne University Jadavpur University
Doctoral advisor	Jussi Hanhimäki
Academic work
Discipline	History
Sub-discipline	20th century, global history, South Asia
Institutions	Boston University, University of Glasgow

Jayita Sarkar is an Indian-American historian and a professor at the University of Glasgow who studies global history and South Asia.

Background and personal life

She received a Ph.D. in international history from the Geneva Graduate Institute, an MA in sociology at the Paris-Sorbonne University, and a BA and MA in political science and international relations at Jadavpur University. She speaks fluent French, Bengali, and Hindi.

Work

Sarkar was an assistant professor at Boston University She has also held fellowships at the Harvard University, Dartmouth College, Yale University and University of Edinburgh.

Her first book, Ploughshares and Swords: India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2022), examines the international and transnational history of India's nuclear program.

The book was awarded the 2024 Bernard S. Cohn Book Prize by the Association for Asian Studies for first books on South Asia. It also won an honorable mention from the global development section of the International Studies Association. It has been called "required reading for historians of several different fields – foreign relations, science and technology, and decolonization."

Sarkar has also been awarded the Doreen and Jim McElvany Nonproliferation Challenge Grand Prize in 2018, alongside historian John Krige for presenting "outstanding historical research that makes a direct intervention into a hot topic in scholarly quantitative literature with clear policy relevance."

Sarkar was elected a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She has contributed op-eds to The Washington Post, Foreign Policy and Lawfare.