Research Fellows

Rohan Deb Roy

Research interests

The 'nonhuman' in science studies, new imperial history, pharmaceutical capital/medical knowledge, cultures of eating, feeding and hunger, South Asia.

I am currently involved in two projects: I am rewriting my doctoral dissertation ('Malarial Connections: Diagnostic Categories, Medical Authorities and Market Situations in British India and beyond, 1820–1912') into a book manuscript. This work draws upon historical literature about the disease-causing entity 'malaria', the drug quinine, cinchona plants and mosquitoes. It revisits the concept of empire by exploring complex concatenations of conversations about imperial agency and nonhuman actancy. Besides, I have begun research on a newer project, which focuses on metaphors and materials associated with the category 'insects' in South Asian history between the late eighteenth and mid twentieth centuries.

Publications

• '"Fairest of Peruvian Maids": Narrating Cinchona and its Travels, British India 1859–1867', Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, [refereed and under revision].
• 'On Quinine and Questions of Authority, British India, 1867–1889', South Asian History and Culture, [invited and forthcoming].
• 'Side Effects of Empire: "Pure" Quinine, Insect-Pests and Malarial Maladies in British India, 1890–1910', Occasional Paper Series: Public and Private: Lives, Institutions and Practices, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, 2011.
• 'Of Tropics, Prisons and Bicycles: A Conversation with David Arnold', Asian Medicine: Tradition and Modernity, 2010/11 Volume 6.1.
• 'Maladies of Modernity: Malaria and the Making of Burdwan Fever', in Saurabh Dube (ed.) Modern Makeovers: The Oxford Handbook of Modernity in South Asia, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, July 2011.
• '"Debility, Diet, Desire": Food in Nineteenth Century Manuals', in Surpiya Chaudhuri and Rimi B Chatterjee (ed.), The Writer's Feast: Food and the Politics of Representation, Orient Blackswan, New Delhi, March 2011.
• Guest Editor, 'History of Medicine Special Issue', Global South (Peer reviewed web journal of the South-South Exchange Programme for the History of Development, Amsterdam) Volume 6, No. 3, July 2010.
• 'Malaria in the Colonial Americas', 'Malaria in Africa', 'Insects, Arthropods and Diseases' in Joseph P Byrne ed. Encyclopedia of Pestilence, Pandemics and Plagues, Greenwood Press, September 2008.
• '"An Unseen, awful visitant": The Return of Burdwan fever', Economic and Political Weekly, Mumbai, Volume 43, No. 12, pp. 62–70, March 2008.
• '"Mal-areas of health": Dispersed histories of a diagnostic category', Economic and Political Weekly, Mumbai, Volume 42, No. 2, pp. 13–19, January 2007.

Organisation

• I am currently the Editorial Coordinator of the Routledge journal South Asian History and Culture.
• Organising a two-day interdisciplinary conference on the tentative theme 'Empires and Nonhumans: Between Agency and Actancy' to be held in Cambridge, in summer 2012.
• Part of International Organising Committee of a conference on 'Global Histories of Medicine and Science' to be held in Glasgow, in April 2012.
• Part of the organising committee of a six day research workshop involving doctoral and post doctoral scholars at the Centre For Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta on the theme 'Public and Private: Lives, Institutions and Practices' in October 2010.
• Have co-organized with Dr Guy Attewell a two-day International Conference (involving twelve speakers) titled 'Locating the "medical" in South Asian History', 30 April–1 May 2010 at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London.
• Acted as the Coordinator of the Modern Medicine Reading Group at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London between March and September 2006.

Awards

• Taniguchi Medal, 2008 (Asian Society for the History of Medicine, Lijiang, China)
• Roy Porter Prize, 2006 (University College London)
• Ashin Das Gupta Prize, 2004 (Presidency College, Calcutta)