Faculty Seed Grant Award, 2023-24 Off-Grid Energy Economy in India
Assistant Professor of Environmental History and the College, Department of History
DPhil 2015 University of Oxford
MAILING ADDRESS
The University of Chicago
Department of History
1126 E. 59th Street, Mailbox 80
Chicago, IL 60637
Social Science Research Building, room 514 – Office
(773) 702-8018 – Office telephone
(773) 702-7550 – Fax
FIELD SPECIALTIES
Environmental history; energy; infrastructure; modern India; capitalism in the global South; climate change.
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, traces the flows of electricity to provide an energy-centered history of India’s transforming political economy since independence in 1947. It analyzes the critical role of cheap energy in undergirding both economic development and democratization, and how political actors have sought to navigate between these competing processes. The book thus locates struggles for energy justice at the heart of climate history and the Anthropocene. In this and other published works, Chatterjee also examines India’s distinctive mode of state capitalism, showing that its basic structures have remained remarkably resilient even as the country has nominally liberalized since the 1980s.
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 early history of solar energy, the history of so-called fuel riots, and the “infrastructural turn” in environmental history.
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 is a non-resident Fellow of the Initiative for Sustainable Energy Policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and a regular public commentator on South Asian affairs.
