Utsa Patnaik taught economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, India starting in 1973 after completing her doctoral thesis at Oxford University until retiring in 2010. She has written, edited and co-edited several volumes including Agrarian Relations and Accumulation – the Mode of Production Debate (1991), The Agrarian Question in Marx and his Successors in two
volumes (2007, 2011), The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era (2013) with the late Sam Moyo and most recently co-authored A Theory of Imperialism (2016) with her husband Prabhat Patnaik.