Dr Heeral Chhabra

Personal Statement

Heeral is currently a Post-Doctoral Research Associate with the ROH Indies project (Remaking One Health: Decolonial Approaches to Street Dogs and Rabies Prevention in India) at University of Liverpool. She was recently awarded PhD from the University of Delhi (2022) for her thesis Animal ‘Welfare’, State Regulations and Questions of Cruelty c.1890-1940s which sought to understand animal-human relationships in colonial India through the prism of law. Her career trajectory so far has led her to research positions and teaching endeavours globally. She was a Global History Fellow at International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam), and a Junior Research Fellow at Indian Council of Historical Research. She has also undertaken postgraduate and undergraduate teaching at University of Liverpool (UK), La Trobe University (Australia), University of Delhi (India) (as Assistant Professor), and Ashoka University (as a Teaching fellow).
As a researcher she has contributed through articles, chapter contributions, and book reviews with international journals and publishers. Her publications include - “Making violent killings ‘humane’: State sponsored elimination of ‘stray’ dogs in colonial India” in ‘Violence Against Animals: Argos- Historical and Archaeological Animal Studies, Vol. 1’ Germany, Animot (2020) ; “Animal Labourers and the Law in Colonial India published” in South Asia Research (2019) ; and “Schools for European and Eurasian children in India: Making of the official policy in colonial India and its contemporary significance” in Policy Futures in Education (2015). She is currently working on her manuscript The Barking Subjects of Empire: The History of Street Dog-Human relations in Colonial India, and also co-editing two books - Animals and South Asian History: Species, People and Environment (based on the first exclusive conference on Animal History in India, co-organised at Ashoka University in 2021); and Writing Global History from Global South [based on SAGHN’S conferences (South Asia Global History Network), of which she is a co-founder]. Her primary research focuses on the history of human-animal relationships and animal ‘welfare’ in colonial India, and also expands to environmental history, global history, the history of education and the pedagogy of history.