MHC Environmental Humanities Seminar with Aviroop Sengupta
Thursday, Feb 06, 2025, 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Plimpton Room (Barker Center 133)

“A Method, Not a Force”: Evolution, Environment, and Indigeneity at the Zoological Survey of India, 1916-1935
Speaker: Aviroop Sengupta, 2024-25 MHC Postdoctoral Fellow
Respondent: Alex Csiszar
Aviroop Sengupta is a historian of science, researching the conceptual-material careers of evolutionary theory, ecology and other allied animal and human sciences in colonial and early post-colonial South Asia. He is reworking his doctoral dissertation into a monograph on the proselytization, practice and eventual demise of a cluster of ‘Indian’ – occasionally ‘indigenous’ – biological sciences between the late-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, which premised their claims to heterodoxy on the allegedly distinct nature of environments and organisms in the subcontinent and/or alternative interpretations of their evolutionary and ecological relationships. The search for an ‘Indian’ biology, Aviroop shows, often cut across racial and political lines and was pursued by Indian as well as European scientists working in the subcontinent, animated by institutional and epistemological rivalries with metropolitan centers of science, and the practical exigencies of investigating understudied natural habitats and animals in the colonial periphery with little support from the state. Aviroop finished his graduate training in South Asian Studies and History at Columbia University and Jawaharlal Nehru University, respectively. His other research interests include the environmental history of the Sundarbans delta, Bengali traditions of natural history writing, and debates on the meaning of life between scientists and non-scientists in colonial India.
Alex Csiszar is Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. He studies the history of science in modern Europe. and publishes primarily on the history of communications media and information technology in the sciences.
About the Series:
The Mahindra Humanities Center presents an Environmental Humanities seminar series with our 2024-25 postdoctoral fellows.
Register
Speaker: Aviroop Sengupta, 2024-25 MHC Postdoctoral Fellow
Respondent: Alex Csiszar
Aviroop Sengupta is a historian of science, researching the conceptual-material careers of evolutionary theory, ecology and other allied animal and human sciences in colonial and early post-colonial South Asia. He is reworking his doctoral dissertation into a monograph on the proselytization, practice and eventual demise of a cluster of ‘Indian’ – occasionally ‘indigenous’ – biological sciences between the late-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, which premised their claims to heterodoxy on the allegedly distinct nature of environments and organisms in the subcontinent and/or alternative interpretations of their evolutionary and ecological relationships. The search for an ‘Indian’ biology, Aviroop shows, often cut across racial and political lines and was pursued by Indian as well as European scientists working in the subcontinent, animated by institutional and epistemological rivalries with metropolitan centers of science, and the practical exigencies of investigating understudied natural habitats and animals in the colonial periphery with little support from the state. Aviroop finished his graduate training in South Asian Studies and History at Columbia University and Jawaharlal Nehru University, respectively. His other research interests include the environmental history of the Sundarbans delta, Bengali traditions of natural history writing, and debates on the meaning of life between scientists and non-scientists in colonial India.
Alex Csiszar is Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. He studies the history of science in modern Europe. and publishes primarily on the history of communications media and information technology in the sciences.
About the Series:
The Mahindra Humanities Center presents an Environmental Humanities seminar series with our 2024-25 postdoctoral fellows.

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