Ramnath, Kalyani

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 as emerging from seemingly banal 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.

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".

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 coastal communities in India were impacted by maritime boundarymaking projects, including legal and scientific efforts to map, model and monitor the oceans, and how they were implicated in risky maritime crossings for survival.

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 project. 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 taught courses on modern South Asia and legal history at the University of Georgia.