Jayeeta Sharma

Jayeeta Sharma is an Associate Professor in History at the University of Toronto. She holds affiliated status with the Global Asia Studies Program, the Asian Institute, the Department of Religion, and the Diaspora and Transnational Program at the University of Toronto. She is an active member of the Editorial Collective of the journal Radical History Review and the editorial board of Global Food History. She is also the series editor for the Empires in Perspective book series from Pickering Chatto Press.

Born in Assam, Jayeeta has studied and taught history on three continents. After receiving a BA, MA, and M.Phil from the University of Delhi, she won a Commonwealth Scholarship to complete her PhD at Cambridge University. Subsequently, she was an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Western Ontario before moving to Toronto.

Professor Sharma's academic interests include migration, labour, family, gender, food, cultural circulation, in studies of Eastern Himalayan borderlands, the British Empire, and post-colonial spaces. Her book, Empire’s Garden: Assam and the Making of India (Duke University Press’s Radical Perspectives book series and Permanent Black, 2011) examines the intersections of colonial tea capitalism with identity contestations in modern and contemporary India. This work links the study of coolie labour, missionary and gentry-generated print culture and internal migration in South Asia to that of imperial commodities, cultural nationalism and post-colonial politics of race, language and ethnicity. In her current research project on the Himalayas, Jayeeta studies labour mobilization, hill-stations, inter-racial intimacies, education, missionary and philanthropic networks across sites as diverse as Darjeeling, Kalimpong, Scotland, Australia, and New Zealand.

Another of her interests is the history of food, particularly in reference to South Asian and Indo-Caribbean imperial and trans-migrant circulation. She has recently embarked on collaborative and digital humanities projects via the Eastern Himalaya Research Network where she is the founding member.