Jayita Sarkar is Professor of Global History of Inequalities at the University of Glasgow's School of Social and Political Sciences. Her research and teaching areas are global and transnational histories of capitalism, infrastructures, and territoriality. She is the author of the award-winning book, Ploughshares and Swords. India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2022).

Jay is currently completing her next book, Atomic Capitalism. A Global History for Princeton University Press. It is a 100-year history of nuclear sites, from mining to energy to weapons-testing. In order to make progress on Atomic Capitalism, she has held research fellowships at Harvard University's Weatherhead Initiative on Global History, Sciences Po, and Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme in Paris. In spring 2026, she will be a visiting professor at Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris to co-teach a course on nuclear politics and conduct further research and writing for Atomic Capitalism.

Before joining Glasgow as senior lecturer (tenured associate professor) in 2022, she was a tenure-track assistant professor at Boston University from 2017 to 2022. She has held research fellowships at Harvard, MIT, Yale, Dartmouth, Edinburgh, and Sciences Po, amongst others. She was most recently on policy secondment as a British Academy Global Innovation Fellow in 2024-25.

She is a book series editor for InterConnections: The Global Twentieth Century that is home to innovative global, international, and transregional histories of the long twentieth century.

She is the founder and host of the podcast, Decolonisation through Archives, Scotland, founded through the Chancellor's Fund (2022-25) and SPS Public Engagement Fund (2023) from the University of Glasgow.