Joya Chatterji

Joya Chatterji FBA is Professor of South Asian History and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.^[1]^[2] She specialises in modern South Asian history and was the editor of the journal Modern Asian Studies for ten years.^[3]

Education

Chatterji gained a First Class Honours Degrees in History from

University of Delhi where she won the prize for Best Student of History and Trinity College, Cambridge where she graduated at the top of the History list. She took a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge.^[1] Her doctoral thesis was on "Communal politics and the partition of Bengal, 1932-1947".^[4]

Career

Chatterji won a 'prize' Junior Research Fellowship. After holding a Fellowship at Trinity, and Wolfson College Cambridge, she taught at the London School of Economics from 2000 to 2007. She then took up her post at the Faculty of History in Cambridge in 2007 and as Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge. ^[2]

In 2014 Chatterji was elected to a personal chair as Professor of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge. 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 30 doctoral theses in these and cognate areas. She taught 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".^[1]

From 2009-2021 she was the editor of Modern Asian Studies. She also has served on the editorial boards of The Historical Journal, Journal of Contemporary History and Economic and Political Weekly.^[2]

Public impact

Chatterji played a prominent role in promoting the study of South Asia as Cambridge as the first woman Director of the University's Centre of South Asian Studies. Chatterji has also played a significant part in the promotion of public history. A key focus has been to promote the teaching of migration to Britain to school children across the UK. she first worked with Drs Claire Alexander and Annu Jalais on the Bangla Stories project. She played a leading role in curating the Freedom and Fragmentation Exhibition, which displayed rare photographs and provided an intimate view of India's partition uprooted in the largest mass migration in human history. These projects have had an impact upon school pupils, teachers, curators, archivists, photographers, and the public in the UK and India, encouraging them to reflect upon the history of migration and how it has shaped society today. She and Claire Alexander then led, along with the Runnymede Trust, the award-winning Our Migration Story website, which enabled teaching across the curriculum of migration to Britain since the dawn of the millennium.

Accolades

Chatterji was elected a

Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society (2013) and of the Royal Historical Society (2017).^[5]^[2]

She is a joint awardee of the Royal Historical Society's Award for Public History (2018) and The Guardian University Award for Research Impact (2019) for Our Migration Story. She has twice received public recognition as a 'Woman of Achievement' from the University of Cambridge.^[citation needed]

Her book Shadows At Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction (2024),^[6] and won the 2024 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History.^[7]

Personal life

Chatterji was born and brought up in Delhi, India.^[8] She has one son born in 1991. She brought him up as a single parent from 1997. For medical reasons she retired from the Faculty of History in 2019, but remains a fellow of Trinity College. ^[2]