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 is a historian of South Asia with research interests in Premodern Empires and Borderlands; Law and Sovereignty; Gender and Sexuality; Histories of Medicine and Illness; and South Asian Literature and Visual Arts. He has taught classes on Premodern South Asian History, Islam, Tibetan History, and South Asian Literatures (Sanskrit, Persian, Pali, Brajbhasha, Urdu, Assamese, and Bengali) at Columbia University.
Apart from research and teaching, he has worked towards building healthy learning environments for LGBTQI+ persons in institutions of higher education. He also occasionally writes commentaries on electoral politics in South Asia and translate Assamese and Bengali literature to English.
Some of his articles and chapters have been published by Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (Duke University Press), Routledge, and Bloomsbury UK (forthcoming). Currently, he is working on a monograph tentatively titled, Formations of the King: Politics, Pleasure, and Law in the Contact Zones of Hindustan, 1700-1830. In the monograph, he reads texts on political theory (in Persian and Assamese), legal imagination (in Sanskrit, Persian, and Assamese), and visual materials towards presenting an alternative genealogy of the practice of political culture before colonial modernity in Brahmaputra Valley (present day Assam) and its contiguous regions.
Research Interests
Empire and Borderlands; Law and Sovereignty; Gender and Sexuality; Histories of Medicine and Illness; South Asian Literatures and Visual Arts.
Publications
- (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