Jayita Sarkar is a visiting professor at CIENS this semester and, as such, is teaching a course entitled: Non-European Nuclear Worlds, focusing on India and South Asia. The course traces India’s nuclear trajectory in its various dimensions—national, international, and transnational—including the issue of proliferation and India’s specific position in the global nuclear order.
A professor of global history of inequality at the University of Glasgow’s School of Social and Political Sciences, her areas of research and teaching are the global and transnational history of capitalism, infrastructure, and territoriality. She is the author of the award-winning book Ploughshares and Swords: India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2022).
Jay is currently completing her next book, Atomic Capitalism: A Global History, for Princeton University Press. It is a century-long history of nuclear sites, from mining to energy to weapons testing. To advance Atomic Capitalism, she has received research fellowships at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Initiative on Global History, Sciences Po, and the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris. In the spring of 2026, she will be a visiting professor at the École normale supérieure in Paris, co-teaching a course on nuclear politics and continuing to work on Atomic Capitalism.
Before joining Glasgow as a senior lecturer (tenured associate professor) in 2022, she was an assistant professor on track to tenure at Boston University from 2017 to 2022. She has received research fellowships at Harvard, MIT, Yale, Dartmouth, Edinburgh, and Sciences Po, among others. More recently, she was seconded on a policy assignment as a British Academy Global Innovation Fellow in 2024-2025.
She is the editor of the book series InterConnections: The Global Twentieth Century, which brings together innovative, global, international, and transregional histories of the long 20th century.
She is the founder and host of the podcast Decolonisation through Archives, Scotland, created with support from the Chancellor’s Fund (2022-25) and the SPS Public Engagement Fund (2023) at the University of Glasgow.
Photo credit: https://www.jayitasarkar.com/
