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Elizabeth Chatterjee is a historian focusing on energy and the environment, with a particular interest in modern India from 1900 to the present. Her research investigates non-Western energy histories, challenging conventional understandings of capitalist development and the social dynamics of climate change. Chatterjee’s forthcoming book, 'Late Acceleration: Energy History in India, Colonialism, and Climate Change,' traces the flows of electricity and provides an energy-centered narrative of India’s political economy during the late colonial period. She aims to uncover the dynamics that underpin the Asian-centric phase of the Great Acceleration and the human impacts on the planet, shifting the spotlight from North Atlantic industrialists and multinationals to the postcolonial state and popular pressures for affordable energy at the core of contemporary environmental crises. Additionally, she is engaged in a variety of topics in energy history, including the 'infrastructural turn' in environmental history, the role of dams in causing earthquakes, and the twentieth-century history of cow dung as an energy source. Chatterjee holds faculty appointments on several committees at the University of Chicago, including the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization, and she actively participates on the board of the UChicago Center in Delhi.
Department of Philosophy