THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
University of Oxford, DPhil '15
AUTUMN QUARTER 2024
OFFICE HOURS
SIGN-UP LINK
BIOGRAPHY
Elizabeth Chatterjee is a historian of energy and the environment, with a focus on India from 1900 to the present. Her research explores how non-Western energy histories disrupt conventional understandings of capitalist development and the social dynamics of climate change.
Chatterjee’s first book manuscript, Electric Democracy: An Energy History of India from Colonialism to Climate Change (under contract with the University of Chicago Press), traces the flows of electricity to provide an energy-centered history of India’s transforming political economy since the late colonial period. In so doing, it seeks to trace the very different dynamics underlying the later, Asian-centric phase of the Great Acceleration in human impacts on the planet. In place of the conventional emphasis on North Atlantic industrialists and private multinationals, it locates the postcolonial state and popular pressures for cheap energy at the heart of our contemporary environmental predicament.
Chatterjee’s second book-length project will provide a novel perspective on the worldwide environmental and energy crisis of the early 1970s as seen from the oil-importing global South, experimenting with how historians might deploy the multisystemic lens of Earth System Science as a methodological approach. She is exploring the links between this crisis and India’s turn to both authoritarianism and fossil fuels during this decade. At the same time, she continues to work on a wide variety of other topics in energy history, including the “infrastructural turn” in environmental history, dams that cause earthquakes, and the twentieth-century history of cow dung energy.
Chatterjee holds faculty appointments in the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization (CEGU), the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, and the Committee on International Relations. She also serves on the board of the UChicago Center in Delhi.
Recent course offerings
- Energy in World Civilization II
- Infrastructure Histories
- Environmental Histories of the Global South
- How (Not) to Save the World: The History of International Development
- The History of Indian Capitalism
- Environmental History (graduate colloquium)
Podcast interviews
- "Environmental Crisis and Recovery," History in Focus, season 2, episode 10 (June 2024).
- "India and the 1970s Energy Crisis w/ Elizabeth Chatterjee," American Prestige (September 2024).
Recent Research / Recent Publications
- “Dams and the Deep Earth: The 1967 Koyna Earthquake and Human Agency in the Anthropocene” (with Sachaet Pandey-Geeta Mantraraj), Past & Present (accepted for publication).
- “Late Acceleration: The Indian Emergency and the Early 1970s Energy Crisis,” American Historical Review 129, no. 2 (2024).
- “Towards an Energetics of Class: Comparing Energy Protests in India and the United States,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 66, no. 3 (2024).
- “The Poor Woman’s Energy: Low-Modernist Solar Technologies and International Development, 1878–1966,” Journal of Global History 18, no. 3 (2023).
- “India’s Oligarchic State Capitalism,” Current History, April 2023.
- “Fossil Fuels from Extraction to Emissions” (with Antoine Acker, Lukas Becker, Nathalia Capellini, and Matthew Shutzer), in Emily O’Gorman, Mark Carey, Sandra Swart, and William San Martín (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Environmental History. Abingdon: Routledge, 2023.
- “New Developmentalism and Its Discontents: State Activism in Modi’s Gujarat and India,” Development and Change 53, no. 1 (2022).
- “State Capitalism in India” (with Rohit Chandra), in Mike Wright, Geoffrey Wood, Alvaro Cuervo-Cazurra, Pei Sun, Ilya Okhmatovskiy, and Anna Grosman (eds.), The Oxford Handbook on State Capitalism and the Firm. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.
- “Numbers Without Experts: The Populist Politics of Quantification,” in Christopher Newfield, Anna Alexandrova, and Stephen John (eds.), The Limits of the Numerical: The Uses and Abuses of Quantification. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022.
- “The Asian Anthropocene: Electricity and Fossil Developmentalism,” Journal of Asian Studies 79, no. 1 (2020).
- Editor, with Matthew McCartney, Class and Conflict: Revisiting Pranab Bardhan’s Political Economy of India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2020.
- “A Climate of Scarcity: Electricity in India, 1899–2016,” in John Brewer, Neil Fromer, Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, and Frank Trentmann (eds.), Scarcity in the Modern World: History, Politics, Society and Sustainability, 1800–2075. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.
- “The Politics of Electricity Reform: Evidence from West Bengal, India,” World Development 104 (2018).
- “Reinventing State Capitalism in India: A View from the Energy Sector,” Contemporary South Asia 25, no. 1 (2017).
- “Feeling Modern: The History of Emotions in Urban South Asia” (with Sneha Krishnan and Megan Eaton Robb), Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 27, no. 4 (2017).