Sarkar Speaks at SHAFR Capitalism Roundtable
On June 19, 2021, Jayita Sarkar, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, participated in a roundtable at the Society for Historians of American Relations‘ (SHAFR) annual meeting on “Capitalism and U.S. Foreign Relations.”
During this roundtable, titled “Collissions of Corporations, Capitalism, and Diplomacy,” panelists examined a challenging but vital aspect of understanding United States diplomatic and global histories: the role of private enterprise. Drawing from her second book manuscript, Light Water Capitalism. US Global Power through Nuclear Things, Sarkar discussed how the histories of capitalism can transform the study of U.S. foreign policy in the twentieth century, with particular reference to U.S. leadership in nuclear technologies and knowhow during the Cold War.
Details of the event can be found on SHAFR’s website.
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.