Bérénice Guyot-Réchard is a historian of South Asia and international relations, with special expertise in the connections between state-making, nation-building and geopolitics, notably in border spaces like the Himalayas and the Indian Ocean.

She is the author of Shadow States: India, China and the Himalayas, 1910-62 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), which won the James Fisher Prize in Nepal and Himalayan Studies 2017, and South Asia Unbound: New International Histories of the Subcontinent (Leiden University Press, 2023), edited with Elisabeth Leake,

Dr Guyot-Réchard joined King’s College London in early 2016, after a Research Fellowship at Emmanuel College, Cambridge and a visiting fellowship at the Graduate Institute, Geneva. She has received multiple awards for her work, from the British Association for South Asian Studies Annual Prize (2012) and Cambridge University’s Prince Consort Prize and Seeley Medal (2014) to a British Academy Rising Star Award (2018) – and, most recently, a Philip Leverhulme Prize in History (2023).

She is currently working on the geopolitics of the Indian Ocean since 1945, and on a history of India’s contribution to the world order from the 18th to the 21st century.

Research interests & PhD supervision

International and transnational relations
South Asia and the Indian Ocean
Frontiers, borders and borderlands
Decolonisation
State-making and nation-building
Maritime spaces

I welcome applications from potential PhD students on projects concerning the international history of South Asia, and on north-eastern India and the Himalayas. For more details, please see my full research profile.

Expertise and public engagement

I regularly contribute to debates on the politics and history of modern South Asia, as well as strategic foresight discussions on the region. I intervene in the international press and online media, but also in policy circles, public history events, and cultural institutions from Delhi to Brussels.

I am the founder of NIHSA - the New International Histories of South Asia network, a research and public engagement platform that works to inform understandings and decision-making on South Asia by intervening into public/policy debates with historically grounded analysis on the subcontinent.

Selected publications

South Asia Unbound: New International Histories of the Subcontinent, edited with Elisabeth Leake (Leiden University Press, 2023)
“Stirring Africa towards India: Apa Pant and the Making of Post-Colonial Diplomacy, 1948–54”. In International History Review 44:4 (2022), 892-913.
“Tangled lands: Burma and India’s unfinished separation, 1937-1948”, in The Journal of Asian Studies (2020).
“The Indian Ocean after 1945”. In Indian Ocean Current: Six Artistic Narratives, ed. Prasannan Parthasarathi (Boston: McMullen Museum of Art, 2020).
Shadow States: India, China and the Himalayas, 1910-1962 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)

Dr Elisabeth Leake

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