Yasmin Saikia

Yasmin Saikia is an American

Saikia's early academic career includes teaching history and conducting research at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. In 2001, she traveled to Bangladesh to conduct research and began conducting interviews with women that would later form the foundation of her 2011 book Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971.

In 2010, she became the Hardt-Nickachos Endowed Chair in Peace Studies and a South Asian history professor at Arizona State University. After she became a professor at ASU, she continued to travel to conduct research. In 2022, she additionally became the co-director of the Center of Muslim Experience in the United States at Arizona State University.

Saikia is the author of several books, including In the Meadows of Gold: Telling Tales of the Swargadeos at the Crossroads of Assam (1997), In 2022, she was appointed as editor for the Muslim South Asia 15-book series from Cambridge University Press.

Fragmented Memories: Struggling to be Tai‐Ahom in India In a review of Fragmented Memories for The Journal of Asian Studies, Jayeeta Sharma writes of how Saikia "posits an alternative view of the precolonial Ahom as a relatively open-status group whose membership came from a diverse set of local peoples participating in a warrior ruling ethos. Rather than an inherited bodily identity, it was a prestigious rank achieved by those who had made it into the king's favor. Later, the British intervention ethnicized the meaning of Ahom and laid the groundwork for the local invention of a Tai-Ahom identity." In a review for The American Historical Review, Sanjib Baruah describes the book as a "significant publication event" in the context of a lack of a "strong intellectual tradition in India of looking at local pasts in autonomous terms", and the limited number of available research visas.

Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971 In a review for Human Rights Quarterly, Elora Chowdhury and Devin Atallah describe Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh as "groundbreaking" because it is one of the few scholarly works addressing the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, as well as because of the book's emphasis on the experience of women during the war. They also describe the book as "provocative because it debunks a number of national myths that have shaped the consciousness of the post-1971 nation of Bangladesh."

Honors and awards 2005 Srikanta Datta Best Book Award on Northeast India and the Social Sciences, for Fragmented Memories: Struggling to be Tai-Ahom in India

Personal life Saikia is Muslim and a naturalized American citizen.