Yasmin Saikia is the Hardt-Nickachos Chair in Peace Studies and a professor of South Asian history at Arizona State University. She is the author of Fragmented Memories: Struggling to be Tai-Ahom in India (2004) and Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971 (2011).

Saikia was born in Assam, India.^[1][2] She completed a bachelor's and master's degree in history at Aligarh Muslim University in India, and then a master's degree in South Asian history and a Ph.D. in South Asian history with a focus on American and Southeast Asia at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.^[3][4]

Saikia's early academic career includes teaching history and conducting research at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.^[4][1] She regularly returned to Guwahati to visit family and to conduct research in India, and spent a year in Pakistan conducting research.^[4] In 2001, she traveled to Bangladesh to conduct research and began conducting interviews with women that would later form the foundation of her 2011 book Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971.^[5]

In 2010, she became the Hardt-Nickachos Endowed Chair in Peace Studies and a South Asian history professor at Arizona State University.^[6] After she became a professor at ASU, she continued to travel to conduct research.^[7] In 2022, she additionally became the co-director of the Center of Muslim Experience in the United States at Arizona State University.^[8][9]

Saikia is the author of several books, including In the Meadows of Gold: Telling Tales of the Swargadeos at the Crossroads of Assam (1997),^[4] Fragmented Memories: Struggling to be Tai‐Ahom in India (2004), and Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh. She has also co-edited various works, including collections intended to become a trilogy: Women and Peace in the Islamic World: Gender, Influence and Agency (2015) and People's Peace: Prospects for a Human Future (2019).^[10] In 2022, she was appointed as editor for the Muslim South Asia 15-book series from Cambridge University Press.^[11]

• 2005 Srikanta Datta Best Book Award on Northeast India and the Social Sciences, for Fragmented Memories: Struggling to be Tai-Ahom in India^[6]
• 2013 Oral History Association Bienniel Book Award, for Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971^[6]

• Saikia, Sayeeda Yasmin (1997). In the Meadows of Gold: Telling Tales of the Swargadeos at the Crossroads of Assam (1. publ ed.). Guwahati: Spectrum Publ. ISBN 9788185319612.
• Saikia, Sayeeda Yasmin (2004). Fragmented Memories: Struggling to be Tai-Ahom in India. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press. ISBN 9780822333739.^[15]
• Saikia, Yasmin (2011). Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971. Durham (N C.): Duke University Press. ISBN 9780822350385.^[16]
• Saikia, Yasmin; Haines, Chad, eds. (2015). Women and Peace in the Islamic world: Gender, Agency and Influence. London New York: I.B. Tauris & Co. ISBN 9781784530174.
• Saikia, Yasmin; Haines, Chad, eds. (2019). People's Peace: Prospects for a Human Future (First ed.). Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press. ISBN 9780815636571.^[17]
• Saikia, Yasmin; Rahman, M. Raisur, eds. (2019). The Cambridge Companion to Sayyid Ahmad Khan. Cambridge New York, NY Port Melbourne New Delhi Singapore: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781108705240.

Saikia is Muslim and a naturalized American citizen.^[9]

• Ahom people
• Assamese people
• Rape during the Bangladesh Liberation War