Ritu Birla
Ritu Birla is an historian of modern South Asia. She is an associate Professor of History and is formerly the Richard Charles Lee Director of the Asian Institute and former Director of the Centre for South Asian Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto. Work After receiving her BA summa cum laude from Columbia College, Columbia University in 1987 she travelled to the University of Cambridge on a Euretta J. Kellett Fellowship for a second BA and MA, before returning to Columbia for her PhD. Her research is centred on capitalism and culture, colonial/postcolonial studies, legal history, as well as critical/gendered approaches to social/political theory. Her book Stages of Capital: Law, Culture and Market Governance in Late Colonial India was the winner of the 2010 Stansky Book Prize (formerly the Albion Prize, awarded by the North American Conference on British Studies). She is recognized for bringing empirical studies of India to current questions in social and political theory, her research has also brought forth new questions of the global study of capitalism and its forms of governing. Thomas R. Metcalf notes: Rarely have historians endeavored to include studies of indigenous mercantile