Janaki Nair retired as a professor of History at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, in 2020. She had also been associated with the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata, and the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai. Her published works include Miners and Millhands: Work Culture and Politics in Princely Mysore (1998), The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore's Twentieth Century (2005) for which she won the New India Foundation Book Prize and Mysore Modern: Rethinking the Region under Princely Rule (2011-12). She has also published widely in national and international journals. Additionally, she has held visiting appointments at the University of California, Berkeley; University of Würzburg; German Historical Institute London; National Museum of Ethnology (Japan), Suita; and Azim Premji University, Bengaluru.