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About Me

I am an early modern historian, specializing in Latin America and South Asia. My research focuses on the intersection of religion and empire, history of emotions, and spatial scales in historical analysis. My first book, The Empire of Apostles: Religion, Accommodatio and the Imagination of Empire in Early Modern Brazil and India (Oxford University Press, 2018) was awarded an honorable mention for the 2020 Bernard S. Cohn Prize awarded by the Association of Asian Studies for the best first book on South Asia. For an in-depth discussion of my recent research, including my upcoming monograph, see here.

Apart from my research interests, I am deeply interested in archival preservation and public humanities. Past work has included digitizing manuscripts in Goa and a pioneering workshop that brought together practitioners in various domains with humanistic scholars in Cairo, Egypt.  I am currently working on two projects: a community-driven archive for the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of U Street in Washington, DC and a pedagogical project on archiving COVID-19.

My work in this domain, in Goa and Kerala, India; Cairo, Egypt and Washington DC, US has received media attention from leading newspapers.

I am a #twitterstorian and you can follow me here.

Recent Publications

The Empire of Apostles: Religion, Accommodatio and the Imagination of Empire in Early Modern Brazil and India, Oxford University Press (2018).

“Mapping ‘Gabriel’: space, identity and slavery in the late sixteenth century Indian Ocean.” Past & Present, Vol. 1, No. 23: 1-34.

 “Between Bhakti And Pietà: Untangling Emotion In Marāṭhī Christian Poetry.” History Of Religions, 56, 4 (May 2017): 365-387.

Ananya Chakravarti. “Peripheral Eyes: Brazilians and India, 1947-61.” Journal of Global History, 10, 1 (2015): 122-146.

Ananya Chakravarti. “The Affective (Re)turn and Early Modern European History: An Afterword.” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques, 41, 2 (2015): 88-96.

Ananya Chakravarti. “The many faces of Baltasar da Costa: imitatio and accommodatio in the seventeenth century Madurai mission.” Etnográfica, 18, 1 (2014): 135-158.

Ananya Chakravarti. “In the Language of the Land: Native Conversion in Jesuit Public Letters from Brazil and India.” Journal of Early Modern History, 17 (2013): 505-524.

Ananya Chakravarti. “Invisible Cities: Natural and Social Space in Colonial Brazil.” Cities and the Circulation of Culture in the Atlantic World From the Early Modern to Modernism, edited by Leonard von Morzé, 13-36. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

Ananya Chakravarti. “Catholic Missionary Texts.” Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction, edited by Susan Broomhall, Routledge, 2016.

Media Coverage

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Social Media

@achakrava

Country Focus

India, Brazil

Expertise by Geography

Asia, Atlantic, India, Latin America

Expertise by Chronology

Pre-17th century, 17th century, Early Modern

Expertise by Topic

Colonialism, Indigenous Peoples, Libraries & Archives, Local & Regional, Pedagogy, Politics, Public History, Religion