Reminder | Lecture by Rohan Deb Roy (Reading): 'Decolonise Mosquitoes' | 17 February 2022 | History of Knowledge Seminar Series
ISHPSS
From: Verburgt, L.m. (Lukas)
All are invited to join the next meeting of the monthly History of Knowledge Seminar Series.
> Rohan Deb Roy (University of Reading)
'Decolonise Mosquitoes'
Date: Thursday
17 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)