Professor Yasmin Khan

Biography

Dr Yasmin Khan, Professor of Modern History, is a historian whose research focuses on the history of the British in India, the British Empire, South Asian decolonization, refugees and the aftermath of empire. She has also written about the Second World War and the imperial dimensions of the conflict.

She was educated at Oxford (St. Peter’s and St. Antony’s colleges) and was previously a Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and a Senior Lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has held research grants from the British Academy (Postdoctoral Fellowship) the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust.

Publications include The Great Partition: the Making of India and Pakistan (Yale University Press/Penguin India, 2007) which won the Gladstone Prize from the Royal Historical Society. She has also published in journals including History Workshop Journal, Modern Asian Studies and the Roundtable: the Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs.

Yasmin has given public lectures and talks in the UK, Nepal, India, Pakistan and the USA. She is a trustee of the Charles Wallace India Trust which welcomes applications from Indian research students. She is an editor of History Workshop Journal, a journal committed to debating the role of history in public life, and exploring the dialogue between past and present. She has contributed to media including the Guardian, BBC Radio and Channel 4 News.

Publications

Books

The Raj at War: a People's History of India's Second World War (The Bodley Head, 2015) published in the USA as India at War by Oxford University Press (September 2015)

The Great Partition: the Making of India and Pakistan (Yale University Press: 2007)

Ashley Jackson, Yasmin Khan & Gajendra Singh eds., An Imperial World at War: The British Empire, 1939-45 (Taylor & Francis, July 2015)

Articles and book chapters

'Wars of Displacement: exile and uprooting in the 1940s' in Tooze and Geyer eds. The Cambridge History of the Second World War vol. 3 (Cambridge University Press, 2015)

'Sex in an Imperial War Zone: Transnational Encounters in Second World War India' History Workshop Journal  2012 73: 240-258

'Remembering and Forgetting: South Asia and the Second World War' in Martin Gegner and Bart Ziino eds., The Heritage of War: Key Issues in Cultural Heritage (Routledge, 2011)

'Performing Peace: Gandhi's assassination as a critical moment in the consolidation of the Nehruvian state', Modern Asian Studies, Volume 45.1 (2011) pp. 57 -80.

'South Asia: from colonial categories to a crisis of faith' in The Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence (Blackwells, Oxford, 2011) pp. 367-379.

'Gandhi's World' in J.M. Brown, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Gandhi (Cambridge University Press, 2011) pp. 10-30.

'The ending of an empire: From Imagined Communities to Nation States in India and Pakistan' The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs vol. 97, no. 398 (Oct. 2008), pp. 693-70