Sharmishtha Roy Chowdhury

Assistant Professor in Residence

Ph.D., Northwestern University

Areas of Specialty

Modern Europe, Modern India, Modern World, History of Human Rights, Modern Middle East

Current Research Interests

Interwar France and the Crisis of Authority, India and the Second World War, the Politics of Spatiality

Biography, Selected Publications

Sharmishtha Roy Chowdhury studied in India and the United States. Her MA degree from Jawaharlal Nehru University was in Modern Indian history, with a research paper in nineteenth century British travelers in Afghanistan. She trained further in modern French history, doing her doctoral work at Northwestern University on the political culture of the interwar French officer corps. Her minor field of study was in the Modern Middle East. This broad training and research travel in France and the United Kingdom gave her a firm foundation in western and non-western history. Roy Chowdhury teaches a range of courses in Indian, European and world history – the history of human rights, living through war in world history, history through fiction, twentieth-century Europe, modern India, etc.

Roy Chowdhury’s book, The First World War, Anticolonialism and Imperial Authority in British India, 1914-1924, was published in 2019. She is currently working on two book manuscripts – one on the interwar French military and the officer corps’ challenges in the postwar world, and another on India in the 1940s in the tumult of the Second World War and decolonization. Roy Chowdhury is also a novelist. Her historical novel The Communist Cookbook (published in 2013) was set in India in the aftermath of the Second World War. She is currently working on a sequel set in the same fictional town in late colonial India. Not surprisingly, one of her favorite courses to teach is “History through Fiction.”

Sharmishtha Roy Chowdhury is also interested in digital humanities and history communication. Trained by historians who were deeply committed to their craft, she attempts to convey that sense of integrity and purpose to students as they use new tools in the digital age. She encourages them to dive deep into primary sources and digital collections and to assess evidence critically as they craft their arguments. The historian’s job may be more challenging in the age of fake history but it is never irrelevant, especially in our times.