Arupjyoti Saikia is Professor of History at the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati. He held the Agrarian Studies Programme Fellowship at Yale University, and visiting fellow positions at Cambridge University and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.

Saikia is the author of Forests and Ecological History of Assam, 1826-2000 (OUP, 2011), A Century of Protests: Peasant Politics in Assam since 1900 (Routledge, 2014), The Unquiet River: A Biography of the Brahmaputra (OUP, 2019), and The Quest for Modern Assam: A History, 1942-2000 (Penguin Random House, 2023). His A Century of Protests won the Srikant Dutt book prize awarded by the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (now PMML), New Delhi, in 2015.

The Unquiet River was shortlisted for the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay New India Foundation Book Prize in 2020, long-listed for the Atta Galatta-Bangalore Literature Festival Book Prize in 2020 and got an ‘Honourable Mention’ for the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize in 2021 given by the Association for Asian Studies. Currently, he is authoring a monograph in Assamese that delves into the lives of 19th-century peasants in Assam.