Navigation auf uzh.ch
Navigation auf uzh.ch
Debjani Bhattacharyya is the Professor for the History of the Anthropocene at the University of Zürich. Since 2019, she has been a non-residential fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of India, at University of Pennsylvania. Before moving to UZH she was an Associate Professor of History and Urban Studies at Drexel University. Her work lies at the intersection of legal and environmental history. Her research is driven by the desire to understand how legal and economic structures order our conceptualization of environmental transformations and shape how we respond to climate crises. Her book, Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta (Cambridge University Press, 2018) 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 writing a long history of how marine insurance market’s risk apprehensions shaped weather knowledge, colonial oceanographic sciences and a derivatives market in climate futures in the Indian Ocean Region.
Her work has been supported by the American Institute of Indian Studies, The History Project funded by the Joint Centre for History and Economics, Harvard University, and Social Science Research Council. She held visiting fellowships at the International Institute of Asian Studies (Leiden), Max-Planck-Institute for Legal History (Frankfurt), and the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University. 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 is the South Asia editor for History Compass. Her writings have also appeared in The Telegraph, Amrita Bajar Patrika, n+1, The Diplomat, and Somatosphere.
She is the director of the Digital History Lab and is the co-director of the Cultural Analysis Program at UZH.
EDUCATION
2008- 2014 Ph.D. Emory University, USA.
2001- 2003 Master of Arts, Jadavpur University, India.
1998- 2001 Bachelor of Arts, Jadavpur University, India.
ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS
2022-
Professor and Chair of the History of the Anthropocene, University of Zürich
2020 - 2022
Associate Professor, Department of History, Drexel University, USA. Affiliate Center for Science, Technology and Society (2020-22), Department of Global Studies and Modern Languages, (2017-22) and Urban Strategy (2016-22).
2014 – 2020
Assistant Professor, Department of History, Drexel University, USA.
GRANTS AND VISITING FELLOWSHIPS
2022 (Summer)
Senior Fellow, American Institute of Asian Studies (AIIS), Ashoka University, India.
2021 (Summer)
Fellow, Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies (FRIAS), Freiburg University, Germany.
2020 -
Non-Resident Fellow, Center for the Advanced Studies of India (CASI), University of Pennsylvania, USA.
2019 -- 2020
Fellow, Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University, USA.
2016 – 2017
Research Fellow, International Institute of Asian Studies (IIAS), Leiden University, The Netherlands.
2011 – 2012
Junior Fellow of American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS), Center for Studies of Social Sciences, Kolkata, India.
EDITORSHIPS
ACTIVITIES AND MEMBERSHIP