Swati Chawla is an Associate Professor of History and Digital Humanities and the director of the Motwani Jadeja Fellowship Program at O.P. Jindal Global University. She also serves as a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Universal Responsibility of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Historical Research Lead at the Dalai Lama Centre for Tibetan and Indian Ancient Wisdom.
She holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Virginia, and B.A., M.A., and M.Phil. degrees in literary studies from the University of Delhi, where she also taught as an assistant professor before starting her doctoral work. Her research focuses on migration in the eastern Himalaya, Tibetan exile, and Tibetan Buddhist female monastic traditions. Swati has held fellowships with the USAID, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Taraknath Das Foundation at Columbia University, the Sacred Writes program at Northeastern University, the College for Higher Tibetan Studies, the Institute for Humane Studies, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.She has mentored undergraduate and graduate students across three continents for the past 15 years, in formal university contexts as well as through her work with think tanks and the development sector, such as the Royal Commonwealth Society, the Glocal Youth Parliament, and the British Council. She was awarded the University of Virginia’s highest teaching honor in 2018.
She runs the X (formerly Twitter) hashtag #himalayanhistories and also hosts a monthly book club on pedagogical practice in Delhi-NCR.
