Jayita Sarkar is a British Academy Global Innovation Fellow for 2024-25 at the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in the Washington, DC office. She is currently on research leave from the University of Glasgow’s School of Social and Political Sciences in the United Kingdom, where she is a professor of global history of inequalities.
Author of the award-winning book, Ploughshares and Swords. India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2022), Jay is currently completing her second book, Atomic Capitalism. A Global History (under contract with Princeton University Press, America in the World series).
Her public writings on nuclear proliferation, nonproliferation, nuclear terrorism, and the global nuclear order have been published in the Washington Post, Lawfare, Diplomat, Foreign Policy, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. She has held positions in thinktanks such as the Stimson Center in Washington, DC, Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies in Oslo, United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research in Geneva, and the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses in New Delhi. Jay currently serves on the board of directors of the Arms Control Association in Washington, DC.
She has held several prestigious research fellowships at Harvard University (Stanton Nuclear Security Fellowship and Ernest May Fellowship in History & Policy), Yale University, MIT, Dartmouth College (U.S. Foreign Policy & International Security Fellowship), University of Edinburgh, and Sciences Po Paris (FMSH DEA). Before joining Glasgow in 2022 as an associate professor, she was assistant professor at Boston University.
Jayita Sarkar uncovers how India built its nuclear program from the ground up and challenges the conventional wisdom that India's nuclear ambitions were an inward-looking endeavor of secretive technocrats.
In this episode of Interpreting India, Jayita Sarkar joins Shibani Mehta to take a step back and understand the history of the Rohingya Crisis. Who are the Rohingya people? What does their story tell us about Myanmar’s political history? When did the polarization between the communities begin?
Carnegie India hosted Jayita Sarkar for a discussion on India’s nuclear program and its history, tracing how the program adapted to emerging challenges and opportunities from within and outside the country. The discussion was moderated by Srinath Raghavan.
