Dr. Swati Chawla

Dr. Swati Chawla is a historian of modern South Asia and the Himalaya. She has a Ph.D. in history from the University of Virginia, and B.A., M.A., and M.Phil. degrees in English from the University of Delhi, where she also taught as an assistant professor of English before starting her doctoral work. Swati has held fellowships with the USAID, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Taraknath Das Foundation at Columbia University, the Sacred Writes program at Northeastern University, the Institute for Humane Studies, the Institute for the Humanities and Global Cultures, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, Koch Foundation, and the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. She has mentored undergraduate and graduate students across three continents for the past 15 years, in formal university contexts as well as through her work with think tanks and the development sector such as the Royal Commonwealth Society, the Glocal Youth Parliament, and the British Council.

Swati is the assistant director of the Centre for Learning and Innovative Pedagogies at JGU. She is committed to a learner-based, reflective, and constantly improvising pedagogy, and has received extensive formal training in designing university courses. She has advised faculty across disciplines in designing effective and inclusive syllabi, classroom environments, and assessment tools. She was awarded the University of Virginia’s highest teaching honor in 2018.

At the JSLH, she teaches courses on Tibetans in India, migration and citizenship, research methods, and digital humanities. In addition to courses in South Asian history and the global studies, Swati has previously taught courses on academic writing, building cross-cultural competence, and engaging difference.

Swati is trained as a digital humanist, and has incorporated DH tools in her research and teaching. She was one of the developers of Ivanhoe—a digital platform for collaborative textual interpretation, and she also worked as a pedagogy specialist for the University of Virginia’s Digital Humanities Curriculum. She has supervised student projects employing geospatial DH tools such as ArcGIS and Google Earth.

She is currently working on her first book project arising from her dissertation. It studies nationalisms and citizenship claims directed towards the late colonial and postcolonial the Indian states from the Tibetan cultural region. Her second book-length project studies Sikkimese nationalism in the decades leading up to Sikkim’s incorporation as the 22nd state of the Indian Union in 1975.

Swati has published articles in peer-reviewed journals and chapters in edited volumes, and co-authored an inter-disciplinary working paper under the USAID and IIE’s Research and Innovation Series titled “Increasing the Civic and Political Participation of Women in the Global South: Understanding the Risk of Strong Resistance.” 

A link to her public-facing work is here. She was recently interviewed about her research and pedagogy at Tibet TV and the Lights | Camera | Azadi podcast (bilingual). She runs the Twitter hashtag #himalayanhistories, and also hosts a monthly book club on pedagogical practice in Delhi-NCR.