Trained in India and the United States, Debjani Bhattacharyya holds the Chair for the History of the Anthropocene at the University of Zürich and directs the Digital History Lab. She specializes in the history of the Anthropocene, climate, environment and the British Empire. Her approach to the Anthropocene is grounded in histories of empire and colonialism. Instead of taking the historicized environment for granted, she investigates the political economic and financial infrastructure that undergird the Anthropocene concept, climate science and environmental justice. She is the author of Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta (Cambridge University Press, 2018) which won the 2019 honorable mention for the best book in Urban History. She leads the ERC consolidator project Fair-Weather Finance: Historical Antecedents to Climate Risk Management which runs from 2026-2031.

Her work has been published in the Journal of Social and Economic History of the Orient, Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Economic and Political Weekly, Global Environment, and Modern Asian Studies. She was the South Asia editor and editor -in-chief for History Compass and currently sits on the editorial board for Anthropocence History, Environmental History, Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Environment and History and South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies. Her writings have also appeared in The Telegraph, Amrita Bajar Patrika, n+1, The Diplomat, Somatosphere, Wochenzeitung (WOZ), Neue Züricher Zeitung and Le Monde Diplomatique.