Convenors

 

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Tanuja Kothiyal (Co-Investigator) is Professor of History in the School of Liberal Studies at Ambedkar University, Delhi, India. She is the author of Nomadic narratives: a history of mobility and identity in the Great Indian Desert (Cambridge University Press, 2016)

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Miles Taylor (Co-Investigator) is Professor of Modern History at the University of York, UK. His most recent books are Empress: Queen Victoria and India (Yale, 2018), and (co-ed), The utopian universities: a global history of the new campuses of the 1960s (Bloomsbury, 2020).

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Researchers

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Arularasan G is a Postgraduate in Anthropology From Pondicherry University. He is a independent action researcher, works on the salt workers of Coramandel Coast. His research areas of interest are Visual and Political Anthropology, concentrating on the occupational health hazards in the salt work and the constitutional rights of the salt workers in the existing laws. He is presently engaged in unionizing the salt workers of Tamil Nadu, joining hand with the Coastal People Rights to Life Movement.

 

Reeti Basu is a Doctoral Candidate at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. Her PhD titled 'The Lives and Times of Foreign Soldiers in Bengal, 1942-46' is near completion. She highlights that many foreign soldiers, especially from America, were visible in Calcutta and other parts of Bengal during the Second World War. She has two published articles from her MPhil dissertation on the patua community of Bengal, namely, 'The Chitrakar's in Naya: Emotions and the Ways of Remembrance', Words and Silences: "Oral History and Emotions", 2018 (https://www.ioha.org/journal/oral-history-and-emotions/). Her research interests are oral history, military history, war and society, and visual history.

 

Neeta Sanghi is interested in salt trade under the colonial regime in India. She explored the Maharashtra State Archives (Mumbai, India) extensively to collect material for her M. Phil dissertation titled ‘Salt taxation and smuggling in Bombay Presidency (1837-1857)’, which convinced her that salt deserves a place along with cotton, opium, indigo, et al in the annals of colonial Indian history. She intends to continue her research work to help secure that place for salt. She can be contacted at neetasanghi@gmail.com.

 

Shivam Sharma is an M.Phil student at the School of Liberal Studies, Ambedkar University Delhi. He has recently submitted his M.Phil thesis titled ‘Making of a Trading Community: Memons in the 19th Century’. His work focuses on a Gujarati merchant community in Indian Ocean depicting how the growth in migratory practices transformed the community from an agricultural and pastoral to a mercantile community in the 19th century colonial India. He has presented a paper ‘Trade, Migration, and Identity: A study of the transformation of the Memon Community’ at the ‘Merchants of Early and Colonial India: Enterprise Community and Politics’ conference jointly organized by London School of Economics, Georgia University, and S.K. Somaiya College of Art, Science, and Commerce in December, 2019. His areas of interests are Community, Identity, Diaspora, Knowledge formation, Archival Politics, Oral History, Indian Ocean in Colonial period, Mercantile History, and Trading Networks.

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Seminar Speakers

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​David Arnold, FBA is Emeritus Professor of Asian and Global History at Warwick University, UK. His many books include: Everyday technology: machines and the making of India’s modernity (Chicago University Press, 2013), Gandhi (Routledge, 2001); Science, technology, and medicine in colonial India (Cambridge University Press, 2000), Nature, culture, imperialism: essays on the environmental history of South Asia (Oxford University Press, 1995) co-ed. with Ramchandra Guha, and Colonizing the body: state medicine and epidemic disease in nineteenth-century India (University of California Press, 1993).

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Rachel Berger is Associate Professor of History and Fellow of the Simone de Beauvoir Institute at Concordia University, Canada. She is the author of Ayurveda Made Modern: Political Histories of Indigenous Medicine in North India, 1900-1955 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). She is currently completing a Wellcome/SSHRC-funded project on the emergence of nutrition as a governable category in South Asia in the 1920s.

 

Kate Boehme is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Leicester, UK. Her co-authored Ruling the world: freedom, civilisation and liberalism in the nineteenth-century British empire is published by Cambridge University Press in January 2021.

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Elisa deCourcy is a Discovery Research Fellow at the Australian National University, Canberra. Her most recent book is Empire, Early Photography and Spectacle: the global career of showman daguerreotypist J.W. Newland (Routledge 2020) co-authored with Martyn Jolly.

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Namrata Ganneri is Assistant Professor in History at SNDT College of Arts & SCB College of Commerce and Science for Women, Mumbai. During 2018-20 she was Commonwealth-Rutherford Fellow at the Centre for Global Health Histories (University of York UK). She is currently completing a monograph on the early history of the Indian smallpox eradication programme. 

 

Ashok Malhotra is a Lecturer in History at Queen’s University Belfast, UK. He is the author of Making British Indian fictions: 1772-1823 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). He is currently working on medical science, race and nutrition in Britain, colonial India, and North America.

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Chandrakant Pandav is former Professor and Head of the Department at the Centre for Community Medicine at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIIMS) in New Delhi, India. He is currently President of the Indian Coalition for Control of Iodine Deficiency Disorders (ICCIDD) and is the author of over 200 papers and several edited volumes.

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Rosalind Parr is Lecturer in Modern History at the University of St Andrews, UK. Her first monograph, Citizens of Everywhere. Indian women, anti-colonialism and global liberalism, 1920s – 1950s, is published by Cambridge University Press in 2021. 

 

Indrajit Ray is a Professor in the Department of Commerce, University of North Bengal, India. He is the author of Bengal industries and the British industrial revolution, 1757-1857 (Routledge, 2011), and The development of modern Industries in Bengal: reindustrialisation, 1857-1914 (Routledge, 2018).

 

Nico Slate is Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA. He is the author of Lord Cornwallis is dead: the struggle for democracy in the United States and India (Harvard University Press, 2019); Gandhi’s search for the perfect diet: eating with the world in mind (University of Washington Press, 2019); The prism of race: W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson and the colored world of Cedric Dover (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); and Colored cosmopolitanism: the shared struggle for freedom in the United States and India (Harvard University Press, 2012).

 

Kapil Yadav is Associate Professor in the Centre for Community Medicine, All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi. He is the National Co-ordinator (India) for Iodine Global Network (IGN), and the author of more than 65 papers.

 

Ashwin Zala is Program Co-ordinator and Editor at the Gandhi Research Foundation, Jalgaon, India. He is completing a PhD on ‘Gandhi’s Resource Mobilization for Public Work’ : at Gujarat Vidyapith, Ahmedabad, India.