Anjali obtained her PhD in History from Trinity College, Cambridge, as a Gates-Cambridge Scholar. Her doctoral thesis was awarded the Ellen McArthur Prize in Economic History by the Faculty of History. She subsequently joined the Centre of South Asian Studies at Cambridge as an Early Career Fellow, where her research was jointly funded by the Isaac Newton Trust and the Leverhulme Trust.
A historian of modern South Asia and the wider Global South, Anjali’s research sits at the intersection of socio-economic history, gender history, histories of capitalism, labour history and histories of empire and decolonisation. Her work is particularly interested in the ways migration, urban change, and everyday forms of capitalism reshaped societies across South Asia and beyond.
She is currently completing her book manuscript, A City in Motion: Gender, Migration and Small Capitalism in India, c.1939–1965 (forthcoming). Alongside this, she is developing two new interdisciplinary research projects: one examining gendered informality and urban transformation in the Global South, and another exploring gender, labour, and work among South Asian migrant women in Britain since the 1960s. Her research has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals, including Modern Asian Studies and South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies. She has two forthcoming articles based on her new research.
Anjali co-convenes and teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses at the Faculty of History. She has extensive experience supervising students working on themes related to, but not limited to, histories of empire, decolonisation, gender, labour, and migration.
At Wolfson College, she serves as Director of Studies in History, contributes significantly to WCRN's Gender Research Network, and is also a College Mentor. She plays an active role in the intellectual life of the College and regularly advises postgraduate students and Junior Research Fellows in Arts and Humanities.
Anjali is also deeply engaged with questions of decolonising the curriculum and EDI initiatives in academia. Alongside her research and teaching, Anjali is committed to fostering more inclusive and critically engaged approaches to history and higher education. She has been actively involved in initiatives around decolonising the curriculum, widening historical perspectives beyond Eurocentric frameworks, and supporting conversations on equality and diversity within academia. Her wider intellectual and public engagement is closely connected to questions of social justice, representation and feminism.