Sarath Pillai

Graduate Associate
History Department
University of Chicago
Email: [email protected]
Website: Personal / faculty page
Biography
Sarath Pillai is a PhD candidate in the History Department at the University of Chicago. He holds a Master of Studies in Law from Yale Law School. His research examines a range of legal and political ideas about sovereignty, state, nationalism, democracy, and rights as they came to cluster around the demand for an All-Indian Federation in late colonial India. Translation and circulation of constitutional ideas and interwar legal and political thought are of special interest to him. He was a Fellow at the Hurst Institute for Legal History at University of Wisconsin-Madison and is currently a Dissertation Fellow at the Center for International Social Science Research at UChicago. His writings have appeared in both peer-reviewed and public forums like Law and History Review, Archives and Records, Economic and Political Weekly, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Diplomat, Scroll.in among others.
Selected publications
- Article · 2026 From international to imperial: The Indian princely states, international law, and the ends of empire in South Asia Leiden Journal of International Law
- Article · 2023 German Lessons: Comparative Constitutionalism, States’ Rights, and Federalist Imaginaries in Interwar India Comparative Studies in Society and History How interwar Indian federalists looked to Imperial Germany for constitutional lessons.
- Article · 2016 Fragmenting the Nation: Divisible Sovereignty and Travancore's Quest for Federal Independence Law and History Review Travancore's bid for independence through divisible sovereignty in late colonial India.
Links go to the publisher's page. See all AGPT scholars' work in the Scholars' library.