Advissory Board

Prabhu Prasad Mohapatra is a leading labour historian of contemporary India and a former Professor in the Department of History at the University of Delhi.  He retired as the Head of the Department and the Dean of Social Sciences in 2024. His PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University was followed by a Fellowship at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library(1989–1993) and Post Doctoral appointments at Yale University (1993–94), School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London,1994 and at the University of Amsterdam (1994–1997). He was a Visiting Fellow at the V.V. Giri National Labour Institute between 1998 and 2002, where he established the Integrated Labour History Research Programme and set up a fully digital and online Archive of Indian Labour, the first of its kind in India. He joined the University of Delhi in 2002 and served as a Visiting Professor at Ecole Normale Supérieure (Cachan) (2008) and the University of Göttingen (2010–11). He held the L.M. Singhvi Senior Fellowship at University of Cambridge (2006) and Fellowship at the International Research Centre on Work and Lifecycle in Global History Perspective, Humboldt University (2011). He co-edited "Labour Matters: Towards Global Histories" alongside Marcel van der Linden and has served as the founding member and Secretary of the Association of Indian Labour Historians (AILH).

Sajal Nag is currently a Distinguished Professor at the Royal Global University, Assam, India. He was previously a Senior Professor at the Department of History, Assam University, Silchar, and held the Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose Distinguished Professor of Social Sciences chair at Presidency University, Kolkata. A 2004-05 Commonwealth Fellow in Queen’s University, Belfast and a 2008 Charles Wallace Fellow, Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge, Prof. Nag specialises in the History of Modern Northeast India and has published extensively on different aspects of the region. His notable books, such as  'India and North East India: Mind, Politics and the Process of Integration 1946-1950' (Regency, Delhi, 1998) and 'Contesting Marginality: Ethnicity, Insurgency and Sub nationalism in North East India' (Manohar, New Delhi, 2002), have received widespread critical acclaim.

Kama Maclean is Professor and Head of Modern South Asian History at the South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg, and a Visiting Professor at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities and former chief editor of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies (2010-23). Her first book, Pilgrimage and Power: The Kumbh Mela in Allahabad (New York: OUP, 2008), is based on her PhD dissertation at La Trobe University (2003). It focuses on the act of pilgrimage as an ‘organic’ communication mechanism, spreading ideas about colonialism, nationalism and modernity. Her second monograph, A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text (New York: Oxford University Press/London: Hurst, 2015), focuses on violent forms of anticolonialism in interwar India. She has also undertaken a study of intercolonial relations between Australia and India via Britain in the early twentieth century. This was published as British India, White Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2020). She has written extensively and is currently teaching and working on a sonic history of anticolonialism in India.

Sobhanlal Datta Gupta was formerly the Surendra Nath Banerjee Chair Professor of Political Science at the University of Calcutta, and is one of the most distinguished scholars of Marxism in India. A student of the erstwhile Presidency College, Datta Gupta has extensively worked on the history of the Comintern with respect to India, leading to the publication of multiple monographs such as 'Comintern, India and the Colonial Question, 1920–37'.  He has been a Fellow of the Asiatic Society, Kolkata and is the General Secretary of the Council for Political Studies. He is currently working on the political philosophy of George Lukacs and Nikolai Bukharin.

Ashok Acharya is a senior Professor of Political Science and the Director of the Delhi School of Transnational Affairs, University of Delhi. He was the Henry Hart Rice Visiting Associate Professor in Global Justice and South Asian Studies (2012–13) at the MacMillan Centre, Yale University. He completed his MPhil from the University of Delhi and his PhD in Political Science from the University of Toronto as a Commonwealth Scholar and a Munk Doctoral Fellow. He co-edited "Political Theory: An Introduction" alongside Rajeev Bhargava.  His research interests lie in contemporary political theory, including issues of social justice, diversity, and rights of groups; comparative inquiries in political philosophy; and cosmopolitan ethics and politics.

Aparna Balachandran is a historian of modern India. An Associate Professor of Modern History in the Department of History at the University of Delhi, her research and teaching interests include legal, urban, and sonic histories of South Asia, as well as museums and memorialisation. She is also interested in the politics and practices of archiving in colonial and post-colonial India. Dr. Balachandran did her BA and MA in History from the University of Delhi, MPhil from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi and PhD from Columbia University, New York. She has co-edited a volume titled “Iterations of Law: Legal Histories from India” (Oxford University Press, 2018) and co-written a book, Archives and Access ( The Centre for Internet and Society, 2011). She is currently completing a monograph on early colonial law and urbanism in Madras and co-writing a book on collective memory, materiality, and history.

Oyndrila Sarkar is an Assistant Professor and the Head of the Department of History, Presidency University, Kolkata. She has a BA and an MA in History from Presidency College, Calcutta, and the University of Calcutta. She received the University Grants Commission Junior Research Fellowship MPhil at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, where her dissertation ‘Cartographic conquests: Men, Machines, and Methods, 1830–1870’ revisited the histories of the trigonometrical surveys in India, survey instruments, and the active role of Indian employees in the Survey of India. She was a recipient of the DFG fellowship for her doctoral studies at the Graduate Programme for Transcultural Studies as part of the Cluster of Excellence, Asia and Europe in a Global Context, at the University of Heidelberg. She is currently working on her first monograph on survey histories, practices, and the production of cartographic knowledge at the north-east frontier of India. She is also working on the administrative cartographies in South Asia, and eighteenth-nineteenth century land and sea intersections in maps and atlases.

Ritesh Kumar Jaiswal is an Assistant Professor at the Department of History, University of Delhi. Previously, he was a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Postdoctoral Visiting Fellow at the University of Zurich (2022). He obtained his PhD from the Department of History, University of Delhi. During his PhD, he was a Fulbright-Nehru Fellow at Harvard University (2017–18), Volkswagen Global History Fellow at the University of Göttingen (2017), and a Junior Research Fellow at the Indian Council for Social Science Research (2019–20), Delhi. His doctoral research was supported by grants obtained from the Charles Wallace India Trust, Cambridge University, Yale University, and Harvard University. This enabled his archival research in the UK, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Malaysia. He has published research papers in International peer-reviewed Journals like Almanack and IJBS and chapters in books published by Brill and Springer. He also writes for popular platforms like Scroll and Indian Forum. He is currently working on his book manuscript on the non- indentured systems migration in the Bay of Bengal. His ongoing research project examines the interwar intersectionality of migration, ethnonationalism, and xenophobia in the Bay of Bengal. His research and teaching interests include the history of global migration systems, history of intermediation, diaspora studies, British imperial history, modern Indian history, global history, labour and migration history, Indian Ocean studies, the history of modern Europe and the USA.

Anwesha Sengupta is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Development Studies Kolkata, where she has been teaching since December 2016. She earned her PhD in 2016 from the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her doctoral dissertation, Breaking up Bengal: Land, People and Things, 1947–1952, explores the socio-political aftermath of Partition in eastern South Asia. Dr. Sengupta’s research interests lie in the history of decolonisation, popular movements in South Asia, forced migration, and border studies. She has been the recipient of several prestigious grants, including fellowships and travel grants from the Malaysian Commonwealth Studies Centre, Indian Council for Historical Research, DAAD, and CSDS-ICSSR. Her academic journey has included research stints at the British Library in London and the Centre for Modern Indian Studies in Göttingen, Germany. She continues to engage deeply with postcolonial South Asian history.

Supurna Banerjee is a feminist academic specialising in sociology and political science. Working as an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Development Studies Kolkata in India, her research focuses on issues of gender, labour, violence, marginalities, and intersectionality. She has published a monograph, edited collections, and articles in peer-reviewed journals. She has recently held a research fellowship at the IGK Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History researchers’ network at Humboldt University of Berlin. She has been part of several national and international research projects. She also writes nonfiction for children.

Navras J. Aafreedi is an Assistant Professor of History at Presidency University, Kolkata, India, a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), New York, and a fellow of the Salzburg Global Seminar's Holocaust Education & Genocide Prevention Program. Besides several papers in peer-reviewed journals, chapters in edited collections, and op-eds in popular media, his numerous publications include a monograph, Jews, Judaizing Movements and the Traditions of Israelite Descent in South Asia (New Delhi: Pragati Publications, 2016) and a co-edited collection Conceptualizing Mass Violence: Representations, Recollections, and Reinterpretations (London and New York: Routledge, 2021). He teaches courses in Jewish History, Genocide Studies, Interfaith Relations, and Minority Studies. He has held visiting fellowships at the universities of Tel Aviv and Sydney and the Woolf Institute, Cambridge, UK, and been a scholar-in-residence at St. John's College, Oxford, for an ISGAP Summer Institute on Critical Antisemitism Studies.