Laurence Gautier is Head Researcher in History, Politics and Society 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. She is particularly interested in the political representation of Indian Muslims beyond political parties. In her PhD thesis, she focused 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. She is developing this analysis further in her monograph currently under preparation, Between Nation and Community. Muslim universities and Indian politics after Partition, to be published by Cambridge University Press.

Building on her thesis, 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 Congress’s “Muslim” policy after independence, in which she plans to explore the tensions between Congress’s secular nationalism and their attitude towards Muslim citizens.