Laurence Gautier is a Researcher in “Documenting Democracy: History, Politics and Citizenship” at CSH.  She holds a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge. Before joining CSH, she taught as Assistant and then as Associate Professor at Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities. Her research examines the debates around Indian Muslims’ position in the nation after partition, as citizens and as a minority group. Her first monograph, Between Nation and Community. Muslim Universities and Indian Politics after Partition (Cambridge University Press, 2024) focuses on the role of Muslim universities as intermediaries between state authorities and the “community”, and as platforms of debates around national integration, minority rights and secularism.

Laurence is also expanding her research work on questions of Muslim leadership and representation in other settings. She co-edited a special issue on ‘Historicizing Sayyid-ness: Social Status and Muslim Identity in South Asia’ (Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society). She is currently preparing, along with Julien Levesque (Ashoka University) and Nicolas Belorgey (CNRS, CSH), a prosopographical study of Muslim leaders, which examines the different types of Muslim leadership that emerged after independence, as well as their relations to Indian state authorities. Finally, Laurence is starting a new research project on intermediaries between state actors and religious minorities in India’s secular regime after independence.