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Dr. Samyak Ghosh

Assistant Professor, Social Sciences

Teaching

Courses

Education

B.A. in English Literature, Calcutta University
M.A. in English Literature, Jadavpur University
MPhil in Social Sciences, Center for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta
PhD in South Asian History, Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, Columbia University

Profile

Samyak Ghosh (they/them) is a historian of South Asia, with research interests in medieval and early modern periods. Their areas of research includes, Premodern Empires, Borderlands and Contact Zones, Material Histories, History of Illness and Medicine, and Public History, Archives Management, and Museum Studies. They teach lecture courses on Premodern and Modern South Asia, along with a seminar course on Public History. Their research has been published in journals like the Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (Duke University Press). Currently they are completing a monograph titled, Kings In-Between: Circulation, Exchange, and Power in the Contact Zones of Hindustan. The monograph recovers a transregional material and cultural history of the localization of Mughal political culture and its interactions with indigenous ideas of kingship and sovereignty in seventeenth through the early nineteenth century, in the contact zones of Hindustan.

Their second book project titled, Learning to Cure: Illness Imagination and Multispecies History in Highland South Asia studies courtly and monastic texts written in Tai-Ahom, Sanskrit, Burmese, and Thai towards an investigation of medicinal knowledge and its multiple iterations in intellectual traditions of South and Southeast Asia. As a scholar and teacher, their commitment lie towards building inclusive spaces of learning, especially for LGBTQIA+ persons and students from historically marginalized groups.

Research Interests

Premodern Empires; Borderlands & Contact Zones, Material History, History of Medicine, Public History & Museum Studies, Gender & Sexuality.

Publications

(Forthcoming) “জাতির জাঁতাকল নাকি ব্রাহ্মণের ম্লেচ্ছসেবা”, আদি আধুনিক দক্ষিণ এশিয়া, আনন্দ পাবলিশার্স।
(Forthcoming) “Antaja Kings in Mlecch land: The Political between Caste and Law in Early Eighteenth-Century Hindustan” (book chapter in a volume on Textual life of Caste, Bloomsbury UK)
“Two Kings in the Tungkhungia Court? Love and Courtly Culture in Early Eighteenth-century Hindustan”, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and Middle East (CSSAME), 42(2), August 2022
“Hinduism” in Jelle Wouters & Tanka Subba (ed.), History of Northeast India, Routledge