Urvi Khaitan is an economic and social historian researching the economics of gender in twentieth-century South Asia. Her work centres the working lives of women pushed to the margins of society by their gender and socio-economic status, arguing that women's labour—paid and unpaid—is central and structural to the South Asian economy. Her doctoral thesis used the 1940s—a period of economic turbulence marked by the Second World War and the Bengal Famine, and consequently, a time of enhanced archival visibility—as a lens to explore women's economic agency and activity.

Urvi is particularly interested in disentangling the relationship between women and work in the longer-term continuum of the challenges of poverty and precarity. Her current work builds on her doctoral research both temporally, by grappling with the question of declining female labour force participation in postcolonial India, and conceptually, by advancing a more inclusive framework and agenda at the intersection of South Asian economic history, gender studies, and political economy.

Urvi holds a DPhil and an MPhil in Economic and Social History from the University of Oxford and a BA in History from St. Stephen's College, University of Delhi. Her work has been supported by the University of Oxford, the Institute of Historical Research and the Royal Historical Society. Community and public engagement greatly inform her academic praxis.

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