Kalyani Ramnath

Kalyani Ramnath is an Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University, and a historian of modern South Asia and Indian Ocean worlds. Her prize-winning first book Boats in a Storm: Law, Migration, and Decolonization in South and Southeast Asia 1942 - 1962 follows legal struggles over citizenship after World War II, narrated through personal and family histories of traders, laborers, and others who moved between South and Southeast Asia. Supported by ACLS and ISERP at Columbia, she is working on a second book that explores how maritime boundary making projects, including legal and scientific efforts to map, model and monitor the oceans, impacted coastal communities, 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 in Barriers and Borders / Visualizing Climate and Loss

Kalyani Ramnath serves as an Advisory Committee Member.