Sarkar Appointed Ernest May Fellow & WIGH Scholar
Jayita Sarkar, Assistant Professor at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, has been appointed as the Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and a visiting scholar with the Weatherhead Initiative of Global History (WIGH) for 2020-21. During this time, Sarkar will make progress on her second book project, titled Light Water Capitalism: The Rise and Fall of U.S. Global Power, which examines the role of U.S. government actors, businesses, and the Export-Import Bank in U.S. nonproliferation efforts.
The Ernest May Fellowship is based at the Applied History Project of the Belfer Center and aims to build “help build the next generation of men and women who will bring professional history to bear on strategic studies and major issues of international affairs.”
The WIGH is one of the research clusters of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs (WCFIA). This cluster began in 2011 as the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History, before becoming the Weatherhead Research Cluster on Global Transformations in 2017. It was was the first of the WCFIA’s original “research clusters” designed to build on and focus its Faculty Associates’ leadership in new directions for international study.
Jayita Sarkar is Assistant Professor at Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, where she is also the founding director of the Global Decolonization Initiative. She teaches diplomatic and political history at graduate and undergraduate levels. Professor Sarkar’s areas of research expertise are 20th century South Asia, history of U.S. foreign relations, politics of nuclear technologies, and connected partitions. Her book, Ploughshares & Swords: India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War, (Forthcoming, Cornell University Press, 2022), examines the first forty years of India’s nuclear program through the prisms of geopolitics and technopolitics. Read more about Professor Sarkar on her faculty profile.