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Haimanti Roy specializes in the political and social history of colonial India and modern South Asia. Her first book, Partitioned Lives: Refugees, Migrants, Citizens in India and Pakistan, 1947-65 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012) examines issues of territoriality, identity, migration and citizenship, and the subsequent re-ordering of national identities of ordinary men and women in post-Partition India and East Pakistan (present day Bangladesh). Her second book, published in 2018, is a short introduction to the Partition of India which is part of the Oxford India Short Introductions series. She is currently working on a social history of travel certificates and identification documents and their implications for framing citizenship in 20th century India.

Roy has previously taught at the University of Cincinnati, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Georgia Institute of Technology. At the University of Dayton, she teaches courses on Gandhi, The British Empire, Religion and Politics in South Asia and core courses for History Majors.

Research interests

• Nationalism
• Colonialism/Imperialism
• Migration
• Citizenship
• Women and Gender in South Asia
• Food, Consumption and Culture

Selected publications

Books

The Partition of India, Oxford India Short Introductions, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018)

Partitioned Lives: Migrants, Refugees, Citizens in India and Pakistan, 1947-65. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Articles

"Paper Rights: Emergence of Documentary Identities in Post-Colonial India, 1950-67", in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Volume 39, Issue 2, June 2016, Pp. 329-349

“Partition.” In Oxford Bibliographies in Hinduism. Ed. Alf Hiltebeitel. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015

"A Partition of Contingency? Public Discourse in Bengal, 1946-47," Modern Asian Studies, 43:6, (2009): 1355-1384.

Reviews and Other Publications

“Testing Citizenship in the Bengal Borderlands,” Current History, Volume 19, Issue 816, April 2020.

"India's Plan to Identity 'illegal immigrants' could get some Muslims declared 'foreign,'" The Conversation, December 5, 2019.

“The Road to India's Partition.” The Conversation: Boston MA. (2017, republished 2018).

“Arya Samaj," “Civil Disobedience Movement,” “Dadabhai Naoroji,” “Dayanand Saraswati,” “Hindu Mahasabha,” “Lala Lajpat Rai,” “Lord Linlithgow,” “Mahadev Ranade,” “Marwaris,” “Motilal Nehru,” “Nana Sahib,” “C Rajagopalachari,” “Ram Manohar Lohia,” “Rashtriya Swam Sevak Sangh,” and “Shiv Sena” in The Cambridge Dictionary of Modern World History, ed. Chris Cook, John Stevenson, et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Book reviews in American Historical Review, The Economic and Political Weekly, Journal of Asian Studies, Contemporary South Asia, Journal of British Studies, and Biblio.