Dr. Chandrima Chakraborty’s research is on public memory, nationalist history, masculinity and religion, social and cultural determinants of health, race and nation-making in Canada, and the politics of memorialization in South Asia and Canada.
Dr. Chakraborty’s areas of graduate supervision include South Asia and its diasporas, memory studies, health equity, social justice, public policy, and media representation. She also serves on MA and PhD committees in global anglophone, gender studies, race and health, and Canadian studies.
Dr. Chakraborty was awarded the title of University Scholar at McMaster University in 2017 and was elected to the Royal Society of Canada's College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists in 2019. She is Director of the Centre for Peace Studies and the Global Peace and Social Justice program at McMaster University. She is an Associate Scientist at the Population Health Research Institute (PHRI) and Executive Committee member of McMaster’s Global Nexus.
Her books include, "Masculinity, Asceticism and Hinduism: Past and Present Imaginings of India" (2011); "Mapping South Asian Masculinities: Men and Political Crises" (edited, 2015) and the coedited anthology, "Remembering Air India: The Art of Public Mourning" (2017). She has published peer-reviewed essays on postcolonial theory; religion and nationalism; Canadian multiculturalism; racial violence and racial grief; memorialization practices; health and disease; Indian, Caribbean, and South Asian Canadian writers and artists; and Bollywood cinema.
Her past and ongoing research on the 1985 Air India bombings (“the worst mass murder in Canadian history”) has refocused the attention of the scholarly community and the general public on this little-remembered Canadian history. She has been conducting interviews with families and friends of those who died on Air India Flight 182 and gathering materials from family members and other critical witnesses for the first-ever archival collection on the Air India Flight 182 tragedy, engaging McMaster Library as the repository, thereby creating a public site for memorialization and ongoing research: https://airindiaflight182.humanities.mcmaster.ca
Her current research projects are examining the relationship between race and disease in Canadian public policy, the differential impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on South Asian, East Asian, and Black communities in Canada’s Greater Toronto Area (GTA), and the role of advocacy groups in COVID-19 mitigation in Ontario. An edited anthology “Yellow Peril Scrutinized: Anti-Asian Racism during the COVID-19 Pandemic” is forthcoming with University of British Columbia Press.
