I'm a PhD student researching famine history in colonial India. My work combines the study of environment, empire, the spread of industrial and commercial capitalism, agricultural history, subaltern history, the history of health and of traditional/indigenous/adivasi resilience through early anthropology and ethnography.

By studying the series of disastrous famines that affected India in the second half of the nineteenth century, using local-level administrative records, first-hand accounts, individual weather station data, memoirs and contemporary literature, my project will plot, in new levels of detail, the causes and effects of famine in British administered India. This work will contribute a new and above all usable model of the development of famine, detailing how the impostition of colonial capitalism and authoritarianism, but also the actions of key individuals, created new levels of mass vulnerabiltiy while plotting the ways in which this vulnerabiltiy maps to socio-economic status, geography, age and gender. My goal is to develop an idea of what a resilient society, one better prepare for the challenge of the unfolding climate crisis, looks like and can be arrived at.