Debjani Bhattacharyya is the Professor for the History of the Anthropocene at the University of Zürich. Since 2019, she has been a non-residential fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of India, at University of Pennsylvania. Before moving to UZH she was an Associate Professor of History at Drexel University. Her work lies at the intersection of legal, environmental, climate history and the history of political economy.  Her book, Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta (Cambridge University Press, 2018) won the 2019 honorable mention for the best book in Urban History. It documented how legal experimentation through the 18th and 19th century was central to reshaping the political economy of urban land and waterscapes in the Bengal Delta. Currently she is writing a long history of how marine insurance market’s risk apprehensions shaped weather knowledge, colonial climate sciences and a derivatives market in weather futures in the Indian Ocean Region. 

Her work has been supported by the American Institute of Indian Studies, The History Project funded by the Joint Centre for History and Economics, Harvard University, and Social Science Research Council. She held visiting fellowships at the International Institute of Asian Studies (Leiden), Max-Planck-Institute for Legal History (Frankfurt), and the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University. Her work has been published in the Journal of Social and Economic History of the Orient, Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Economic and Political Weekly, Global Environment, and Modern Asian Studies. She was the South Asia editor and editor -in-chief for History Compass and currently sits on the editorial board for Environmental History, Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Environment and History and South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies. Her writings have also appeared in The Telegraph, Amrita Bajar Patrika, n+1, The Diplomat, Somatosphere, Wochenzeitung (WOZ), Neue Züricher Zeitung and Le Monde Diplomatique.

She directs the Digital History Lab

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