Uttara Shahani

Uttara Shahani is a historian. She has research interests in the history of colonial South Asia, partitions, refugee regimes, Sindh, and the Sindh diaspora.

Uttara qualified as a lawyer before completing a PhD on Sindh and the partition of India and an ESRC funded postdoctoral research fellowship at the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge. Prior to her appointment as a Departmental Lecturer, she was a postdoctoral researcher working with Dr Anne Irfan at the Refugee Studies Centre on the British Academy-funded research project Borders, global governance and the refugee, examining the historical origins of the global refugee regime with a focus on South Asia and Palestine.

Uttara teaches on the postcolonial borders and forced migration and research methods courses.

Interviews

‘The Unfamiliarity of the Past-Interview with Joya Chatterji on the release of Partition's Legacies,’ for Permanent Black, (with Sohini Chattopadhyay), November 2020.

‘Writing the legacies of a partition: a conversation with Joya Chatterji', (with Sohini Chattopadhyay), November 2020.

A Conversation with Harmony Siganporia on 'I am the Widow: An Intellectual Biography of Behramji Malabari,'  December 2019. 

Blogs

‘The dispersal of displaced persons in the British empire and beyond: from World War Two to the Partition of India', Refugee History Blog, June 2021. 

Round Tables

CM Roundtable VII on Pippa Virdee's ‘From the Ashes of 1947: Reimagining Punjab,’ Chapati Mystery, August 2021. 

Media

‘Sindh is not a piece of territory-Sindhi belonging in India’, The Leaflet Special Issue on Citizenship, 26 January 2021.