Indrani Chatterjee has taught young people on three continents over two decades. Chatterjee’s teaching interests have evolved to keep pace with her own travels in time. At the undergraduate level, she has taught survey courses on gender and modern India, the Indian subcontinent from 1750 to 1950, the partition of 1947 in history and memory, as well as  upper-level seminar courses on slavery, abolition and South Asian history, and more. At the graduate level, Chatterjee has taught courses titled “Postcolonial Theory and Histories of the Global South,” “The Culture of Economics/ Culture and Economics,” and “Decolonizing Gender.” All of her classes are designed to inform as well as to interrogate.

Chatterjee’s research focuses on probing the micro-historical with a view to understanding the macro-historical, to probing the region-specific families and lineages so that we can better understand the dilemmas of modern ethnic, electoral and constitutional democracies in India. Her current research questions how layers of authority in precolonial India shaped the working of caste, class and gender in the same periods.