Events

This seminar in the history of science in South Asia features two leading speakers in the field who will discuss their new research relating to debates around the recasting of scientific disciplines, continental landscapes, and measures of time and the weather in colonial India:

The Science of Water and Weather in Late Colonial India
Sunil Amrith, Mehra Family Professor of South Asian Studies, Professor of History, Harvard University

The Making of Gondwana: Geology and the Colonial Conquest of Time in India?
Pratik Chakrabarti, Professor and Chair of History of Science and Medicine, Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester

Both lectures will explore several tropes and narratives of sciences and the deep past, such as the ancient supercontinent Gondwanaland, colonial efforts to appropriate India’s antiquity and to shape and reconfigure time in the present; and the making of scientific authority around the monsoons and the weather of the subcontinent.

Chairs and Organizers of the Seminar:

• Kavita Sivaramakrishnan, Assistant Professor of Sociomedical Sciences, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health
• Eugenia Lean, Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Culture, Director of Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
• Marwa Elshakry, Associate Professor of History, Columbia University

Free and open to the public.

This seminar is co-sponsored by The Center for Science and Society and the South Asia Institute.

Image Credit: Ball, V. Jungle Life in India: Or, The Journeys and Journals of an Indian Geologist. London: T. De La Rue, 1880.