Kalyani Ramnath
Kalyani Ramnath is a historian of modern South Asia, with research and teaching interests in legal history, histories of migration and displacement, transnational history, and questions of archival method.
Her first book Boats in a Storm: Law, Migration, and Decolonization in South and Southeast Asia 1942 - 1962 (Stanford University Press, 2023) is an account of legal struggles over citizenship following the end of World War II, narrated through personal and family histories of traders, laborers, and others who moved between South and Southeast Asia. It reframes citizenship not only as a constitutional or legislative fact, but also as emerging from encounters that people had with taxation, immigration, and detention regimes of newly independent nation-states. It won the Distinguished Book Award from the Asian Law and Society Association in 2024 and was chosen as one of the best history books of 2023 in History Today. An India edition was published with Westland / Context Books in 2025.
In 2021, Ramnath was awarded the Surrency Prize for the best article published in the Law and History Review as well as the Jane Burbank Prize for best article on global legal history from the American Society for Legal History for the article titled "Intertwined Itineraries of Law: Debt, Decolonization, and International Law in Post-WWII South Asia."
Beginning in Fall 2025, Ramnath will convene a series of conversations around political belonging at The Belonging Lab. Please contact her if you would like to be placed on a mailing list.
Ramnath is working on a second book tentatively titled Adrift in the Indian Ocean, supported by a year-long fellowship from the American Council for Learned Societies. It explores how maritime boundary making projects, including legal and scientific efforts to map, model and monitor the oceans, impacted coastal communities, and how they were implicated in people’s risky maritime crossings for survival. Peer reviewed essays from this project have been published in Past and Present and Law and History Review. A brief reflective piece from this project titled “Temporary” is featured on the Barriers and Borders / Visualizing Climate and Loss website. An additional area of interest is the history of international law at universities in Asia. Some of the preliminary notes on this project are in this essay written in honor of the Socio-Legal Review’s 20th Anniversary Issue (2025).
Ramnath received her Ph.D. in History from Princeton University, where she was elected to the Prize Fellowship in the Social Sciences (formerly the Society of Woodrow Wilson Scholars). She was a Prize Fellow in Economics, History, and Politics at the Center for History and Economics at Harvard University from 2018 - 2021, where she coordinated the History and the Law and Spaces of Law projects. Ramnath holds a bachelor's degree in arts and law from the National Law School of India University and a master's degree in law from the Yale Law School. Prior to Columbia, she was an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Georgia (2022 – 2024).