Rohit De

Rohit De

Rohit De will join Yale University as an Assistant Professor of History in June 2014.  Trained both as a lawyer and as a historian of modern South Asia, he is interested in the ways through which law and legal institutions affect the everyday life of people. At Yale, Rohit will teach courses on the history of South Asia, the making of contemporary India and Pakistan, Indian political thought, religion and the state, the Indian constitution among others, alongside comparative courses on law, colonialism and empire and methods in legal history.

His current research explores how the Indian constitution, despite its elite authorship and alien antecedents, came to permeate everyday life and imagination in India during its transition from colonial state to postcolonial republic. This builds on his previous research on colonial India, which examined the the role played by lawyers, legal networks and litigation in shaping debates over women’s rights, Islamic law and civil liberties.

Rohit is the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for History and Economics at Cambridge University. He will receive his PhD in History from Princeton University, where he was nominated to the Society of Woodrow Wilson Fellows. He graduated with a law degree from the National Law School of India University and completed his LL.M at the Yale Law School. In 2007, he was the Fox International Fellow at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.

Rohit is also interested in comparative constitutional law, particularly how Anglo-American constitutional principles have been reworked by the courts in developing nations. He has clerked at the Supreme Court of India with Chief Justice K.G Balakrishnan and worked with constitutional reform projects in Sri Lanka and Nepal.