Uttara Shahani

Uttara Shahani is a historian. She has research interests in the history of modern South Asia, the British Empire, colonialism, 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. In 2025 she was awarded a Teaching Excellence Award by the Social Sciences Division for her contributions to the MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies.

She is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

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.