He is a professor of History at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati. He has held 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, 2023). His A Century of Protests won Srikant Dutt Book Award given by Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (now PMML), New Delhi, in 2015. The Unquiet River was shortlisted for the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize in 2020, long-listed for the Atta Galatta-Bangalore Literature Festival Book Prize in 2020 and got an ‘Honourable Mention’ for Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize in 2021 given by Association for Asian Studies. Assam’s economic journey between 1947 and 2000 unfolds in Saikia’s upcoming book project.