Ramnath, Kalyani

Consultation/Advisory Hours

Fall 2025: Thursdays, 1:00 - 3:00 pm. Please book an appointment here.

Education

Ph.D. Princeton University, 2018, LL.M (Yale Law School), 2010

BA, LLB (Hons.) National Law School of India University, 2009

Interests and Research

Kalyani Ramnath is a historian of modern South Asia, with research and teaching interests in legal history, histories of migration and displacement, transnational history, and questions of archival method.

Her first book Boats in a Storm: Law, Migration, and Decolonization in South and Southeast Asia 1942 - 1962 (Stanford University Press, 2023) is an account of legal struggles over citizenship following the end of World War II, narrated through personal and family histories of traders, laborers, and others who moved between South and Southeast Asia. It reframes citizenship not only as a constitutional or legislative fact, but also as emerging from encounters that people had with taxation, immigration, and detention regimes of newly independent nation-states. It won the Distinguished Book Award from the Asian Law and Society Association in 2024 and was chosen as one of the best history books of 2023 in History Today. An India edition was published with Westland / Context Books in 2025.

In 2021, Ramnath was awarded the Surrency Prize for the best article published in the Law and History Review as well as the Jane Burbank Prize for best article on global legal history from the American Society for Legal History for the article titled "Intertwined Itineraries of Law: Debt, Decolonization, and International Law in Post-WWII South Asia."

Beginning in Fall 2025, Ramnath will convene a series of conversations around political belonging at The Belonging Lab. Please contact her if you would like to be placed on a mailing list.

Ramnath is working on a second book tentatively titled Adrift in the Indian Ocean, supported by a year-long fellowship from the American Council for Learned Societies. It explores how maritime boundary making projects, including legal and scientific efforts to map, model and monitor the oceans, impacted coastal communities, and how they were implicated in people’s risky maritime crossings for survival. Peer reviewed essays from this project have been published in Past and Present and Law and History Review. A brief reflective piece from this project titled “Temporary” is featured on the Barriers and Borders / Visualizing Climate and Loss website. An additional area of interest is the history of international law at universities in Asia. Some of the preliminary notes on this project are in this essay written in honor of the Socio-Legal Review’s 20th Anniversary Issue (2025).

Ramnath received her Ph.D. in History from Princeton University, where she was elected to the Prize Fellowship in the Social Sciences (formerly the Society of Woodrow Wilson Scholars). She was a Prize Fellow in Economics, History, and Politics at the Center for History and Economics at Harvard University from 2018 - 2021, where she coordinated the History and the Law and Spaces of Law projects. Ramnath holds a bachelor's degree in arts and law from the National Law School of India University and a master's degree in law from the Yale Law School. Prior to Columbia, she was an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Georgia (2022 – 2024).

Publications

2025 “Stateless in South Asia: Immigration, Nationality, and Citizenship Legislation under challenge in Colombo and London, c. 1953” Statelessness in Asia (Cambridge University Press, Jacyln Neo, Christoph Sperfeldt and Michelle Foster eds, 2025).

2024 "Adrift in the Andaman Sea: Law, Archipelagoes, and the Making of Maritime Sovereignty”, Past and Present, Volume 265 Supplement (2024)

2023 ‘Other Partitions: Migrant Geographies and Disconnected Histories between India and Malaya, 1945-1965’, South Asia Unbound: New International Histories of the Subcontinent (Berenice Guyot-Rechard and Elisabeth Leake eds., Leiden University Press)

2022 ‘Making Maritime Boundaries in the Bay of Bengal’, 40 (3) Law and History Review (2022)

2022 ‘Law and the Political Imaginary in Mid-Twentieth Century Southern India’, Political Imaginaries of Mid-Twentieth Century Southern India (Mrinalini Sinha and Manu Goswami eds., Bloomsbury Academic Publishing)

2021 ‘Histories of Indian Citizenship in the Age of Decolonization’, Itinerario: A Journal of Imperial and Global Interactions

2020 ‘Intertwined Itineraries of Law: Debt, Decolonization, and International Law in Post-World War II South Asia’ 38(1) Law and History Review

2016 ‘ADM Jabalpur’s Antecedents: Political Emergencies, Civil Liberties and Arguments from Colonial Continuities in India,’ 31 (2) American University International Law Review

2013 ‘The Colonial Difference between Law and Fact: Notes on the Criminal Jury in India,’ 50 (3) Indian Social and Economic History Review

2012 ‘We the People, Seamless Webs and Social Revolutions: Imagination and Expectation in the Constituent Assembly Debates of India,’ 32(1) South Asia Research (reprinted in The Constituent Assembly Reader: Deliberations on Democracy (Udit Bhatia ed., Routledge Publishing, 2018)

2011 ‘Justice in her Infinite Variety’ (book review essay) Mithi Mukherjee, ‘India in the Shadows of Empire’ 8 Socio-Legal Review (2011).

2011 ‘Of Limited Suits and Limitless Legalities: Interpreting Legal Procedure in the Ayodhya Judgment’, 5 NUALS Law Journal (2011).

2011 ‘The Runaway Judgment: Law-as-Literature, Courtcraft and Constitutional Visions’, 3 Journal of Indian Law and Society (2011).