We're going nuclear today with Jayita Sarkar! Jay is a Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow. Before settling down in Scotland, she was an Assistant Professor at Boston University and a Niehaus Fellow at Dartmouth College. She was also a Fellow with Harvard University’s Weatherhead Initiative in Global History, an Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy, and a Stanton Postdoctoral Fellow, all also at Harvard. She received her Ph.D. in History from the Graduate Institute Geneva, an MA at the University of Paris IV, Sorbonne, and a BA and MA in Political Science and International Relations at Jadavpur University.

Jay is the author of Ploughshares and Swords: India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell), which was a 2023 Honourable Mention for the Best Book Award of ISA Global Development Studies Section. Her articles have appeared in Cold War History, the Journal of Cold War Studies, the Journal of Strategic Studies, and the Journal of Global Security Studies, among others. Her 2018 article in Nonproliferation Review entitled “U.S. Technological Collaboration for Nonproliferation: Key Evidence from the Cold War”  (With J. Krige) won the 2018 Doreen and Jim McElvany Nonproliferation Award. Her second book, Atomic Capitalism: A Global History, is under contract with Princeton University Press.

Jay has received grants from the Stanton Foundation, The Hoover Institution, The Swiss National Science Foundation, and the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies, to name just a few. She was recently granted a British Academy Award to support “Partition Machine,” an upcoming conference she has organized on territorial partitions. Jayita sits on the Editorial Board of Cold War History, the Editorial Advisory Board of Global Nuclear Histories Book Series at McGill-Queen’s University Press, and the Board of Directors of the Arms Control Association. She is a member of the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. On top of all that, she’s a polyglot who speaks Bengali, English, and French fluently with a little German, Hindu and Urdu thrown in for good measure.

Join us for a delightful and really interesting chat with Jay Sarkar - we'll talk India's nuclear policy, Glasgow v. Edinburgh, Scottish Straight Cats, Diego Maradona, and Pink Martini, among many other topics!

Rec.: 04/21/2023