CISMAC

Suvendu Ghatak (Ph.D Student, English) – “Malarial Modernity: Colonialism and the Politics of Health in Modern South Asia”

In this presentation, Suvendu Ghatak will describe how in colonial South Asia, malaria became marked as the pathology of primitivity and degeneracy. Reading across medical, administrative, and literary archives in English, Bengali, and Hindi, between 1780 and 1950, he identifies the conjunctures of medical and cultural narratives in shaping this history. He demonstrates how the symbolization of colonial rule as a deliverance out of malaria into modernity obscured the role of modern colonial policies in shaping malarial epidemics. He concludes by tracing the continuities of this colonial semantics of malaria in postcolonial polities of South Asia.

Katherine McNamara (Ph.D. Student, Environmental and Global Health) — “People, Plants, and Pandemics”

Katherine McNamara’s research in Ecuador leverages archival and anthropological methods to explore how relationships between people and medicinal plants evolve as health ecologies shift. Using two disease events as focal points — the emergence of malaria in the 17th century and the COVID-19 pandemic — she positions present-day relationships with quina (Cinchona officinalis), the endangered tree from which quinine and hydroxychloroquine are derived, within a broader history of extraction and intimacy. Her talk engages with the history of science and medicine to reveal novel insights into the environmental fallout of human crises while advancing public health commitments to the humanities writ large.