Biography
Antara Haldar specializes in law and development, law and economics, and legal theory – and she is particularly interested in the area lying at the intersection of the three fields. Her work, which is fundamentally interdisciplinary, is defined by its attempt to cut past the dichotomization between the ‘law and economics’ and ‘law and society’ approaches – as well as to bridge the gap between theory and empirics that characterises much of the current development literature. Her work spans the topics of microfinance and other credit markets, land titling and property rights, the relationship between formal and informal law (including the role of trust) and evolutionary institutional dynamics. She is also interested in research methods and epistemology, as well as issues of race and gender.
Antara is University Lecturer in Empirical Legal Studies at the University of Cambridge – a tenure-track position. She holds degrees in both law and economics – and was educated at St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, Trinity College, University of Cambridge and Columbia University. She received her PhD in 2010.
Before returning to teach at Cambridge, she was based at Columbia University with affiliations both at the University’s pre-eminent centre for research in the social sciences, the Committee on Global Thought (chaired by Joseph Stiglitz & Saskia Sassen), and the Law School. She also held a prestigious Jean Monnet-Global Governance Fellowship at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute. Antara has collaborated closely with leading development experts around the world, most notably Joseph Stiglitz, and been involved in high-level research projects like the American Bar Association's World Justice Project, the Initiative for Policy Dialogue's China Task Force, as well as several initiatives of the New York-based Institute for New Economic Thinking. In addition, she has worked with internationally renowned policy experts in India, Canada and South Africa and, in the process, been involved in important legal activism projects and contributed to crucial legislative reform.
Antara has been the recipient of numerous academic grants and awards, including the highly competitive Oxford-Princeton Global Leaders Fellowship, the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Trust Scholarship and the Cambridge Law Faculty’s own Yorke Prize for “making a substantial contribution to…legal knowledge”. She is a Research Associate at Centre for Business Research (CBR) at Cambridge’s Judge Business School – and is involved in a number of their projects, including a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council. Her research has been published widely, and – in addition to presenting frequently at top international conferences – she is invited to speak and teach all over the world.