Contact information
Research groups
Uttara Shahani
PhD
Departmental Lecturer in Forced Migration
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.
Recent publications
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Following Richard Burton: Religious Identity and Difference in Colonial Sindh
Journal article
Uttara Shahani, (2022), Philological Encounters, 1 - 34
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Refugee Legal Challenges to the Bombay Government's Land Requisition Housing Scheme
Journal article
Uttara Shahani, (2018), Economic and Political Weekly, 53 (4), 73 - 79