Ramnath, Kalyani

Assistant Professor

Consultation/Advisory Hours

FALL 2024: On research leave 2024 - '25"

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

I am 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. My first book is Boats in a Storm: Law, Migration, and Decolonization in South and Southeast Asia 1942 - 1962 (Stanford University Press, 2023), 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 as emerging from seemingly banal encounters that people had with taxation, immigration, and detention regimes of newly independent nation-states. In 2021, I was awarded the Surrency Prize and the Jane Burbank Prize for Global Legal History from the American Society for Legal History for my article titled "Intertwined Itineraries of Law: Debt, Decolonization, and International Law in Post-WWII South Asia".

I am working on a second book tentatively titled Adrift in the Indian Ocean, for which I was recently awarded a year-long ACLS Fellowship. It will look at the role of legal fictions in enclosing maritime space in the Indian Ocean and its impact on, and relationship with, coastal communities.

I received my Ph.D. in history from Princeton University, where I was elected to the Prize Fellowship in the Social Sciences (formerly the Society of Woodrow Wilson Scholars) and then, a Prize Fellow in Economics, History, and Politics at the Center for History and Economics at Harvard University from 2018 - 2021, where I coordinated the History and the Law project. I also hold 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.

Publications

2023 Boats in a Storm: Law, Migration and Decolonization in South and Southeast Asia (Stanford University Press, 2023)

2023 “Other Partitions: Migrant Geographies, Disconnected Histories between India and Malaya, 1945 - 1965” , South Asia Unbound: New International Histories of the Subcontinent (Elisabeth Leake and
Berenice Guyot-Rechard eds., Amsterdam 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 in Twentieth-Century India (Mrinalini Sinha and Manu Goswami eds., Bloomsbury UK) (Bloomsbury UK)

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

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

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

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

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