Research Sabbatical
Prof. Dr. Debjani Bhattacharyya is on research sabbatical until September 2026.
Her classes in spring semester are held by Dr. Rothenburg and Dr. Atiya Hussain:
Seminar: Hybrid landscapes: Water Infrastructures Beyond Nature and Culture
Colloquium: Land Grab, State Grab: Post-War Capitalism and Decolonisation
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Trained in India and the United States, Debjani Bhattacharyya holds the Chair for the History of the Anthropocene at the University of Zürich and directs the Digital History Lab. She specializes in the history of the Anthropocene, climate, environment and the British Empire. Her approach to the Anthropocene is grounded in histories of empire and colonialism. Instead of taking the historicized environment for granted, she investigates the political economic and financial infrastructure that undergird the Anthropocene concept, climate science and environmental justice. How law and finance shape environmental concerns and climate futures has been an abiding interest in her work. She is a member of the Capitalism Studies Network at Australia National University and is a steering Committee Member of UZH Competence Center for Sustainable Finance.
She is the author of Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta (Cambridge University Press, 2018) which won the 2019 honorable mention for the best book in Urban History. It documented how legal experimentation through the 18th and 19th century was central to reshaping the political economy of urban land and waterscapes in the Bengal Delta. Currently she is working on her second book of how marine insurance market’s risk apprehensions shaped weather knowledge, colonial climate sciences and a derivatives market in weather futures in the Indian Ocean Region. She leads the ERC consolidator project Fair-Weather Finance: Historical Antecedents to Climate Risk Management which runs from 2026-2031.
Before moving to UZH she was an Associate Professor of History at Drexel University. She has held fellowships at the Center for the Advanced Study of India, at University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia), International Institute of Asian Studies (Leiden), Max-Planck-Institute for Legal History (Frankfurt), the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University, Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies (FRIAS). In 2026 she will be Visiting Professor at Australian National University. In 2026-2027 she will be a member of the Historical Studies of Institute of Advanced Studies, Princeton.
Her work has been supported by the European Research Council, Swiss National Foundation, American Institute of Indian Studies, The History Project funded by the Joint Centre for History and Economics, Harvard University, Social Science Research Council. Her work has been published in the Journal of Social and Economic History of the Orient, Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Economic and Political Weekly, Global Environment, and Modern Asian Studies. She was the South Asia editor and editor -in-chief for History Compass and currently sits on the editorial board for Anthropocence History, Environmental History, Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Environment and History and South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies. Her writings have also appeared in The Telegraph, Amrita Bajar Patrika, n+1, The Diplomat, Somatosphere, Wochenzeitung (WOZ), Neue Züricher Zeitung and Le Monde Diplomatique.
She regularly works with museums including the Stapherhaus, Landesmuseum, FocusTerra and is part of the Climate and Colonialism Working Group at the Paul Mellon Center and sits on the advisory committee of Linda Hall Library.