Yasmin Saikia

Yasmin Saikia is the Hardt-Nickachos Chair in Peace Studies and a professor of South Asian history at Arizona State University. She is the author of Fragmented Memories: Struggling to be Tai-Ahom in India (2004) and Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971 (2011).

Early life and education
Saikia was born in Assam, India. She completed a bachelor's and master's degree in history at Aligarh Muslim University in India, and then a master's degree in South Asian history and a Ph.D. in South Asian history with a focus on American and Southeast Asia at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Career
Saikia's early academic career includes teaching history and conducting research at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She regularly returned to Guwahati to visit family and to conduct research in India, and spent a year in Pakistan conducting research. In 2001, she traveled to Bangladesh to conduct research and began conducting interviews with women that would later form the foundation of her 2011 book Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971.

In 2010, she became the Hardt-Nickachos Endowed Chair in Peace Studies and a South Asian history professor at Arizona State University. After she became a professor at ASU, she continued to travel to conduct research. In 2022, she additionally became the co-director of the Center of Muslim Experience in the United States at Arizona State University.

Saikia is the author of several books, including In the Meadows of Gold: Telling Tales of the Swargadeos at the Crossroads of Assam (1997), Fragmented Memories: Struggling to be Tai‐Ahom in India (2004), and Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh. She has also co-edited various works, including collections intended to become a trilogy: Women and Peace in the Islamic World: Gender, Influence and Agency (2015) and People's Peace: Prospects for a Human Future (2019). In 2022, she was appointed as editor for the Muslim South Asia 15-book series from Cambridge University Press.

Fragmented Memories: Struggling to be Tai‐Ahom in India
In a review of Fragmented Memories for The Journal of Asian Studies, Jayeeta Sharma writes of how Saikia "posits an alternative view of the precolonial Ahom as a relatively open-status group whose membership came from a diverse set of local peoples participating in a warrior ruling ethos. Rather than an inherited bodily identity, it was a prestigious rank achieved by those who had made it into the king's favor. Later, the British intervention ethnicized the meaning of Ahom and laid the groundwork for the local invention of a Tai-Ahom identity." In a review for The American Historical Review, Sanjib Baruah describes the book as a "significant publication event" in the context of a lack of a "strong intellectual tradition in India of looking at local pasts in autonomous terms", and the limited number of available research visas.

Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971
In a review for Human Rights Quarterly, Elora Chowdhury and Devin Atallah describe Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh as "groundbreaking" because it is one of the few scholarly works addressing the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, as well as because of the book's emphasis on the experience of women during the war. They also describe the book as "provocative because it debunks a number of national myths that have shaped the consciousness of the post-1971 nation of Bangladesh." Hannah Sholder describes the book as "unique" in a review for the South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal and writes, "By bringing the experiences of Bangladeshi women from diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds into the spotlight, Saikia not only challenges the often one-sided and nationalistic accounts of the war, but she also produces an alternative discourse that reveals an opportunity for reconciliation to heal the wounds of war which are still festering today among those who experienced the war or its aftereffects."

Honors and awards

 * 2005 Srikanta Datta Best Book Award on Northeast India and the Social Sciences, for Fragmented Memories: Struggling to be Tai-Ahom in India
 * 2013 Oral History Association Bienniel Book Award, for Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971

Personal life
Saikia is Muslim and a naturalized American citizen.