In this episode, we're joined by Tathagat Bhatia, a graduate student at the MIT HASTS programme. Tathagat was a member of the 2021 Gates Cambridge cohort and pursued an MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine. Prior to Cambridge, they pursued a BA in Science, Technology and Society (STS) and Russian from the University of Pennsylvania. Tathagat is interested in the history of Earth and Environmental Sciences as narrated from mid-twentieth-century South Asia. In particular, they're interested in the origin stories of earth systems models in oceanography and atmospheric chemistry that make a claim to universality or globality, but are in fact rooted in quite regional or local scales.
Tathagat retains a strong interest in histories of development and growth in the subcontinent, especially as they intersect with debates over environmentalism. They've previously worked on the prehistory of the Green Revolution in India, rivers as sites of environmental knowledge production in colonial and postcolonial South Asia, and how virologists made birds into an object of inquiry while tracking the spread of tropical disease during the Cold War.
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The views expressed on this podcast are solely those of the speakers and do not reflect those of the Editorial Board, the Scholars’ Council, the Gates Cambridge Trust or the University of Cambridge.
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