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.
With COVID-19, her research interest has expanded to studying the relationship between colonialism, race and infectious disease. She is co-editing a book tentatively titled "The Return of Yellow Peril: Anti-Asian Racism during the COVID-19 Pandemic."
Member, Royal Society of Canada's College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists; University Scholar, McMaster University