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Director
Ritu Birla
Director of the Centre for South Asian Studies
Email: csas.director@utoronto.ca
Ritu Birla is an Associate Professor of History and Director of the Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Toronto. Her research addresses modern South Asian history and colonial studies; global histories of capitalism and genealogies of modernity; legal history and theory; liberal governing its gendered social imaginaries, from kinship to economy and civil society; postcolonial intellectual history and historiography; and the relationship between fictions (legal and literary) and history. Recognized for bringing the empirical study of India to current questions in social and political theory, her research has helped to build new conversations in the global study of capitalism and its forms of governing. Birla's first book, Stages of Capital: Law, Culture and Market Governance in Late Colonial India (Duke University Press, 2009; Orient Blackswan India, 2010), winner of the 2010 Albion Book Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies, delves into colonial India's legal and vernacular commercial worlds to tell the story of the modern emergence of "the economy" as an abstract site of governance and model for social relations. The book has received over twenty-five reviews, in journals as wide-ranging as The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, The Law and Society Review, The Times of India, The Harvard Business History Review, The Journal of Economic History, and Studi Culturali (in Italian). Another recent volume (co-edited with Faisal Devji) reflects her interests in new paths for political/social theory and intellectual history via readings of non-western engagements with economic and political liberalism: Itineraries of Self-Rule: Essays on the Centenary of Gandhi's Hind Swaraj, a special issue of the award-winning journal Public Culture. Birla has also published widely on themes such as the performativity of law, history as critical practice, the problem of area studies, and the culturalist discourses that accompany economic codings of the social. Selected recent articles include "Law as Economy: Convention, Corporation, Currency" in the inaugural volume of the University of California, Irvine Law Review (2012); "Performativity Between Logos and Nomos: Law, Temporality and the Non-Economic Analysis of Power" 21 Columbia Journal of Gender and Law 90 (2011); "Might as well Face it, We're Addicted to Gandhi" Public Culture 23:2 (2011); "Postcolonial Studies: Now that's History" in Rosalind Morris, Ed. Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea, (Columbia, 2010); and "Vernacular Capitalists and the Modern Subject in India: Law, Cultural Politics and Market Ethics" in Anand Pandian and Daud Ali Eds. Ethical Life in South Asia, (University of Indiana, 2010). Her current projects and forthcoming articles address, broadly and collectively, legal worlds of capital and the making of contemporary globality.
Through her many invited academic presentations and public events, Professor Birla is also actively involved in a wide range of interdisciplinary, inter-area conversations. A few representative examples of recent invited venues include the Cambridge University World History and South Asia Seminars; the UC Santa Cruz Department of Feminist Studies; South Asia seminars at Oxford, Princeton and the University of Chicago; the UC Irvine School of Law; Columbia Law School, conference on Judith Butler's thought; the Harvard Program in the Study Capitalism; The Columbia Centre for Comparative Literature and Society's "Worlds of Capital" project; the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi; and Harvard Law School's Advanced Institute for Law and Global Policy. Birla has co-organized conferences in Johannesburg and Mumbai in 2009, and in December of 2010, delivered the Godrej Archives Lecture in Mumbai, speaking on philanthropy and public culture in India. At the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, in March of 2011, she moderated a discussion on Gandhi and Tagore between the prominent global public intellectuals Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Ashis Nandy.
A recipient of both research and conference grants, Professor Birla has also been recognized for her teaching excellence with a Presidential Teaching Award from Columbia University, and the Rini Ghosh Arts and Science Excellence in Teaching Award from the Arts and Science Student Union at the University of Toronto, of which she was the first recipient, in 2004. Birla received her BA summa cum laude from Columbia College, Columbia University, and then traveled to Cambridge University on a Euretta J. Kellett Fellowship for a second BA and MA, before returning to Columbia for her PhD.
Staff
Angela Tozer
Assistant to the Director of the Centre for South Asian Studies
Room: 103N
Tel: 416.946.8979
Email: csas.assist@utoronto.ca
Through her many invited academic presentations and public events, Professor Birla is also actively involved in a wide range of interdisciplinary, inter-area conversations. A few representative examples of recent invited venues include the Cambridge University World History and South Asia Seminars; the UC Santa Cruz Department of Feminist Studies; South Asia seminars at Oxford, Princeton and the University of Chicago; the UC Irvine School of Law; Columbia Law School, conference on Judith Butler's thought; the Harvard Program in the Study Capitalism; The Columbia Centre for Comparative Literature and Society's "Worlds of Capital" project; the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi; and Harvard Law School's Advanced Institute for Law and Global Policy. Birla has co-organized conferences in Johannesburg and Mumbai in 2009, and in December of 2010, delivered the Godrej Archives Lecture in Mumbai, speaking on philanthropy and public culture in India. At the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, in March of 2011, she moderated a discussion on Gandhi and Tagore between the prominent global public intellectuals Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Ashis Nandy.
A recipient of both research and conference grants, Professor Birla has also been recognized for her teaching excellence with a Presidential Teaching Award from Columbia University, and the Rini Ghosh Arts and Science Excellence in Teaching Award from the Arts and Science Student Union at the University of Toronto, of which she was the first recipient, in 2004. Birla received her BA summa cum laude from Columbia College, Columbia University, and then traveled to Cambridge University on a Euretta J. Kellett Fellowship for a second BA and MA, before returning to Columbia for her PhD.
Tel: 416.946.8979
Asian Institute Staff Supporting CSAS
Eileen Lam
Associate Director of the Asian Institute
Room: 226N
Tel: 416.946.8997
Email: eileen.lam@utoronto.ca
Katherine MacIvor
Program Administrator and Communications Officer
Contemporary Asian Studies Program | Minor in South Asian Studies
Collaborative Master's and Doctoral Program in South Asian Studies
Room: 228N
Tel: 416.946.8832
Email: ai.asianstudies@utoronto.ca
Aga Baranowska
Events Coordinator and Administrator
Room: 227N
Tel: 416.946.8996
Email: asian.institute@utoronto.ca
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