Meghna Chaudhuri

My research interests include modern South Asia, global political economy, social theory and the history of economic thought.

I believe in work that cuts across disciplinary boundaries and welcome students from a broad range of majors and backgrounds with interests in South Asia, law and global empires, histories of science and intellectual history, capitalism and finance. 

I grew up in Calcutta (now, Kolkata) but think of Delhi and New York City where I spent close to a decade each as home too. Over time, I have nurtured strong parasocial relationships with my favorite tennis players and Bollywood celebrities. No 90s and 2000s film is not so bad as to be good (we do not speak of the ‘80s). I teach a range of courses that connect South Asia to global political economy through the lens of concepts like property, race, neoliberalism and nationalism or industries and infrastructural assemblages such as Bollywood, television and institutional science.

Research

I am currently working on my book Invisible Attachments: Global Finance, Developmentalism and Subjectivity in South Asia. The book documents how South Asians participated in constituting new subjectivities as forward-thinking, ideal economic subjects as ties of credit and other financial forms bound agrarian hinterlands, global financial and physical infrastructures together. Ultimately, my book argues that finance emerged as the very basis of welfarism as a mode of governance in the late-nineteenth century, revealing a much longer, and globally interconnected history of financial individuation than afforded by accounts of welfarism’s “other”: contemporary neoliberalism.

Coming out of research I began doing as part of my first project, I have also begun outlining my second project on the production of colonial Bombay and postcolonial Mumbai as a specific type of urban space through its sustained, almost metronymic history of financial and real estate bubbles.

My research and writing has appeared in a range of venues on topics such as the financial logic through which “development” was put to work in service of maintaining an embattled Britain's hegemonic grip over imperially organized global capital, on the politics of sub-imperialism that undergirded the impulse of transnational, radical solidarities such as Pan-Asianism, or the state-subsidized rise of transnational businesses in India. 

Teaching

HIS 171: Making Modern South Asia, 1730-1950
HIS 277: Possession: Property, Empire and Law, 1500-present
HIS 272: Inventing India: The Rise of Hindu Nationalism, 1850-present
HIS 377: Capitalism and Crisis: A History of Now, 1600-present
HIS 473: Bollywood Nation: Infrastructure, Identity and Globalization, 1920-present
HIS 475: Neoliberalism: A Global History
HIS 2xx: Credit to the Nation: Money and Sovereignty in Modern History
HIS 3xx: AI and the Scientific Revolution