Chandrima Chakraborty

Chandrima Chakraborty's research is on the literatures and cultures of South Asia and the South Asian diaspora, with a focus on the intersections of nationalist history and public memory. She has published widely on masculinity and nationalism, race and nation-making in Canada, politics of memorialization and Indian popular cinema.

Over the last decade, she has drawn public attention to the 1985 Air India tragedy and its aftermath initiating the first scholarly efforts to consolidate research on the subject with an edited feature section in TOPIA (2012), and an anthology, Remembering Air India: The Art of Public Mourning (2017, coedited with Amber Dean and Angela Failler). She has been conducting interviews with Air India family members and gathering materials from family members and other critical witnesses for the first-ever archival collection and open online archive on Air India, to be hosted by McMaster Library.

Her current research projects examine the relationship between colonialism, race and disease in Canadian public policy, the differential impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on South Asian, East Asian, and Black communities in Ontario and the role of South Asian advocacy groups in COVID-19 mitigation in Ontario. She is co-editing a book tentatively titled "The Return of Yellow Peril: Anti-Asian Racism during the COVID-19 Pandemic."