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Dr. Sarath Pillai

Pronouns: He/Him

Positions

Assistant Professor

Faculty of Arts, Department of History

Contact information

Email

sarath.pillai@ucalgary.ca

Web presence

Non-Resident Scholar, Center for the Advanced Study of India, UPenn.

LinkedIn

Phone number

Office: 403-220-2987

Location

Office: Social Sciences618

Background

Educational Background

PhD History, University of Chicago, 2022

MSL Law, Yale Law School, 2018

Postdoctoral Research Fellow Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania (2022-24),

Biography

Sarath Pillai is a historian of modern South Asia, focusing on the history of federalism and Indian Princely states. His first book project offers an intellectual and legal history of federal ideas in South Asia in the long twentieth century. The book's narrative arc is centered on protagonists who are usually sidelined in the triumphal narratives of the Indian nation-state--such as leaders of the Indian Princely States, Communists, Muslim minorities, liberals, lawyers, and vernacular intellectuals and politicians. The book draws on multilingual archives in India, the UK, and the US, collected over a period of twenty months, and is based on his PhD dissertation in History, completed with distinction at the University of Chicago. His dissertation was awarded the 2022 Sardar Patel Award for the best dissertation on Modern India in any humanities or social sciences discipline in the US by UCLA. He also holds a Master of Studies in Law (MSL) from Yale Law School.

Before joining Calgary, he was the A. Kenneth Pye Visiting Assistant Professor at the Department of History at Southern Methodist University, Dallas. At SMU, he taught courses like Civilization of India, History of Capitalism in South Asia, Law and Society in South Asia, and History of the British Empire. For two years, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI) at the University of Pennsylvania. At CASI, he coordinated a seminar series featuring both in-person and virtual talks on modern India. In Philadelphia, he completed two major public history initiatives at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP) as an intern. First, he wrote the first-ever South Asia Subject guide for HSP, giving an overarching view of its South Asia collections from the 17th century to the present. Second, he inventoried the private papers of Harry Adamson, a Philadelphia-based activist who was infected with HIV in 1982 and died in 2021. He was elected for a two-year term as the first-ever postdoctoral representative to sit on the University Council--the highest and widely deliberative body of the University of Pennsylvania--representing over 1400 postdocs on campus.

He was a Fellow at the Hurst Institute in Legal History at the University of Wisconsin Law School in 2021. His research has been supported by the American Historical Association, Center for International Social Science Research, Social Sciences Research Center, Committee on Southern Asian Studies, Nicholson Center for British Studies, Oscar M. Ruebhausen Fund for Research at Yale Law School, Humboldt-Yale History Network Travel Grant, Florence Tan Moeson Fellowship at the Library of Congress, Harry S Truman Library and Princeton University Library.

Research

Areas of Research

South Asian History

My interests include the political, legal, and intellectual history of Modern South Asia and the British Empire. I am especially interested in the history of the Indian Princely States, federalism, and decolonization in South Asia. 

Courses

Course number Course title Semester
HTST 307 The Contemporary World

Awards

  • Sardar Patel Award for the Best dissertation on Modern South Asia in the US, Center for India and South Asia, University of California Los Angeles. 2022

Publications

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