Rohit De appointed Chair of South Asian Studies Council

The South Asian Studies Council is pleased to announce the appointment of Rohit De, Associate Professor of History, as Chair of the Council. De had been serving as Acting Chair for the spring 2025 semester during previous SASC Chair Sunil Amrith’s planned sabbatical. De’s permanent appointment as Chair with a term extending through Spring 2028 follows Amrith’s appointment as Director of the MacMillan Center earlier this month.
“It's an absolute pleasure and privilege to be invited to Chair the South Asian Studies Council, an institution that has been both my intellectual home and provided camaraderie and fellowship during my time at Yale,” De said of his appointment. “I'm grateful to my predecessors and the fantastic administrative team who have grown the Council to become one of the leading centers for research on South Asia in a very short period of time.”
De is a leading scholar of modern South Asian legal and constitutional history. His prize-winning first book, A People’s Constitution (2018), explored how the Indian constitution, despite its elite authorship and alien antecedents, came to permeate everyday life and imagination in the year’s following India’s independence. His second book, Assembling the Indian Constitution, coauthored with historian Ornit Shani, will be published later this year. The book focuses on how ordinary Indians read and engaged with the anticipated constitution at the time of its writing.
Reflecting on De’s appointment, Sunil Amrith stated, “I can’t imagine a better chair for SASC than Rohit De. I say this from every possible angle—as a fan of his work, as a close colleague in the History department, and as a beneficiary of his advice and generosity over many years. Rohit will bring to the role his remarkable sense of intellectual openness, and his commitment to understanding South Asian societies in all their complexity. His appointment is great news for the Council, and for all of MacMillan.”