Update | Lecture by Rohan Deb Roy (Reading): 'Decolonise Mosquitoes' | 24 February 2022 | History of Knowledge Seminar Series
ISHPSS
All are
invited to join the next meeting of the monthly History
of Knowledge Seminar Series.
* NB: This
talk was scheduled for 17 February. It will now take place
one week later, on Thursday 24 February *
> Rohan Deb Roy (University of Reading)
'Decolonise Mosquitoes'
Date: Thursday
24 February 2022
Time: 15:30-17:00 (CET/Amsterdam-time)
Place: Online (Microsoft Teams)
*No
registration needed. Please click here to attend
the meeting *
> Abstract
The decolonial turn in the academy is recent but
pervasive. Scholarly manifestoes in many academic
disciplines, ranging from ethnography to geology, have
urged on the need to explore, and contest the impacts of
colonialism in their respective fields. But what
possibilities and challenges are revealed when
decolonising insights are applied to rethink specific
categories in animal history? In this talk, I address this
question by focussing on mosquitoes in British India. In
the process, I will elucidate three distinct historical
processes: ‘invisible labour’, ‘dissent’ and
‘re-colonisation’. I will argue that the project of
‘decolonising mosquitoes’ should be grounded on a
scholarly praxis that enables historians to formulate
newer critiques of colonialism. I will also comment on why
it is problematic for such a project to seek convenient
alternatives in post-colonial nationalisms.
> Speaker
Rohan
Deb Roy is an Associate Professor in South Asian History
at the University of Reading, where he is also Co-Director
of the Centre for Health Humanities. He is the editor of
the British Journal for the History of Science Themes,
an associate reviews editor of the American Historical
Review, a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and
the Royal Historical Society, and the author of Malarial
Subjects: Empire, Medicine and Nonhumans in British
India (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
> More
Information
This
seminar is organized by Lukas M. Verburgt and Elske de
Waal with support from the Descartes Centre, NIAS, and the
Huizinga Institute. Please visit our website for more
information, the full 2021-22 program, and to subscribe to
our newsletter.
Fellow, Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS)
Guest Researcher, Institute of Philosophy, Leiden University
l.m.ve...@uu.nl / lukas.v...@nias.knaw.nl / l.m.ve...@hum.leidenuniv.nl
Forthcoming books
John Venn: A Life in Logic (The University of Chicago Press, 2022)
The Cambridge Companion to John Herschel, co-with Stephen Case (Cambridge University Press, 2022)
Recent papers
'The Works of Francis Bacon: A Victorian Classic in the History of Science', Isis (2021)
'History, Scientific Ignorance, and the Anthropocene', Journal for the History of Knowledge (2021)
'Pragmatism at Cambridge, England before 1900', BJHP (2021)