Professor Elizabeth Chatterjee

IAS Annual Theme: Time

Department of History, University of Chicago

Elizabeth Chatterjee is a historian of energy and the environment, with a focus on India from 1900 to the present. Her research explores how non-Western energy histories disrupt conventional understandings of capitalist development, the social dynamics of climate change, and green political thought.

Chatterjee鈥檚 first book manuscript, Electric Democracy, traces the flows of electricity to provide an energy-centered history of India鈥檚 transforming political economy since independence in 1947. It analyzes the critical role of cheap energy in undergirding both economic development and democratization, and how political actors have sought to navigate between these competing processes. The book thus locates struggles for energy justice at the heart of climate history and the Anthropocene.

Before joining the Department of History, Chatterjee was a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Chicago鈥檚 Franke Institute for the Humanities, and a tenure-track lecturer at Queen Mary University of London. She is a non-resident Fellow of the Initiative for Sustainable Energy Policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and a regular public commentator on South Asian affairs.