Ritu Birla is Professor Emerita of History, University of Toronto. There, she was also Director of the Research Initiative in Global Governance, Economy and Society, and before that, the Richard Charles Lee Director of the Asian Institute. Recognized for bringing the study of economy and empire to current questions in social and political theory, Professor Birla’s research has built global conversations on capitalism and its forms of governing. Her award-winning work, Stages of Capital: Law, Culture and Market Governance in Late Colonial India (Duke University Press, 2009; Orient Blackswan India, 2010) continues to be cited widely for its foundational analysis of colonial law regulating markets; what she has called the “vernacular” kinship-based capitalism of the bazaar; and through this lens, the production of the abstraction we call “the economy” as an object of governance, as a name for the public and as model for social relations.
Birla has published broadly across the humanities and social sciences on such dynamics of market embeddedness and economization. Her writing has foregrounded the legal fictions that animate capitalist economic modernity—the household, the trust, the corporation—investigating law, culture and economy as gendered and mutually constitutive value-systems.
Birla’s recent research elaborates on her studies of vernacular speculative practices, including futures trading and monetizing weather forecasting, to consider financial imaginaries and media that engage with uncertainty in liberal and neoliberal political economy. She is currently completing a book solicited by Duke University Press on speculative governing, highlighting stories from imperial financialization and economic liberalization in India.
Other new research addresses currency and genealogies of global governance; semiotic approaches to capitalism; performativity and derivative value-production; and translations and genealogies of ‘eastern’ spirituality in the psychology of the contemporary economic subject. She is on the Senior Editorial Board of Public Culture and the Editorial Advisory Board of Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics. Professor Birla graduated Columbia College summa cum laude and was therecipient of theEuretta J. Kellett Fellowship to Cambridge University, where she earned a second B.A. and M.A. in History, returning to Columbia History for her PhD.
