Aparna Vaidik is historian of South Asia. She has previously taught at Georgetown University, Washington DC and University of Delhi and was educated at JNU, University of Cambridge, and St. Stephen’s College. She has to her credit a diverse set of monographs, journal articles and book chapters in volumes on environmental history, labour history, history of Indian nationalism and revolutionism, the history of the Indian Ocean and its islands and psychoanalytical history. Her most recent monograph is Waiting for Swaraj: Inner Lives of Indian Revolutionaries (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Her first monograph was Imperial Andamans: Colonial Encounter and Island History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and her book Revolutionaries on Trial: Sedition, Betrayal and Martyrdom (Aleph, 2022) is forthcoming. She has also written a work of a creative non-fiction titled My Son’s Inheritance: A Secret History of Lynching and Blood Justice in India (Aleph 2020). Currently she is working on a book project on the contemporary history of India titled ‘The Republic’s Preamble’ (Aleph, 2024). Underlying her various intellectual interests is an abiding fascination with the historian’s craft, specifically, historiography, theory and the historical method.
She has won two major international grants – the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the British Academy Grant for a Public History project, apart from several other grants, fellowships, and awards from Indian Council for Historical Research, Georgetown University and the Charles Wallace Trust.
Other than research, pedagogical innovation, curricular design, research supervision and mentorship of graduate and undergraduate students are the defining aspects of her academic and intellectual life. She is also involved in various Public History projects. These include membership of the Milli Consortium, a group of individuals and communities interested in nurturing and protecting archives; working as a consultant on a project run by the Delhi Art Gallery for curating a public exhibition at the New Delhi’s Red Fort ‘March to Freedom’; and serving as an expert for historical ethnography for ‘Agra-Lahore Heritage Project’ of the American Institute of Indian Studies.
