Dr Ole Birk Laursen is a historian of modern South Asia, with a particular focus on anti-colonialism, transnationalism, exile, and anarchism. He has published extensively on the history of South Asian anti-colonialism in early twentieth-century Europe and is currently writing a biography of the Indian anti-colonial anarchist M.P.T. Acharya (1887–1954). Tracing Acharya’s life, activities, and movements across India, Europe, North America, the Middle East, and Russia, the book explores the lived experience of transnationalism and transimperialism in the first half of the twentieth century. In doing so, it illuminates connections and dissonances between empires and nation-states as well as intellectual discourses on freedom during the struggle for independence.

Publications
- Spaces of Indian Anticolonialism in Early Twentieth Century London and Paris, in: South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 44/4 (forthcoming).
- “I have only One Country, it is the World”: Madame Cama, Anticolonialism, and Indian-Russian Revolutionary Networks in Paris, 1907–1917, in: History Workshop Journal, 90 (Autumn 2020), pp. 96–114.
- “Anarchism, pure and simple”: M. P. T. Acharya, Anti-Colonialism and the International Anarchist Movement, in: Postcolonial Studies, 22/3 (2020), pp. 241–255.
- Anti-Colonialism, Terrorism and the “Politics of Friendship”: Virendranath Chattopadhyaya and the European Anarchist Movement, 1910–1927, in: Anarchist Studies, 27/1 (2019), pp. 47–62.
- Anarchist Anti-Imperialism: Guy Aldred and the Indian Revolutionary Movement, 1909-1914, in: Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 46/2 (2018), pp. 286–303.