Sci-Tech Asia Webinar

Sci-Tech Asia Book Forum: Dialogue on “Moving Crops and the Scales of History” (Yale UP, 2023)

Webinar Description

Speaker

Richa Kumar (Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India) — Commentator
Richa Kumar is Associate Professor of Sociology and Science and Technology Studies at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Her research and teaching interests include Sociology of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition, Science and Technology Studies, and Rural and Agrarian Policy. Her current research is on the impact of monoculture farming on farm systems, the environment and human health. She is the author of Rethinking Revolutions: Soyabean, Choupals and the Changing Countryside in Central India (Oxford University Press, 2016), and the State of Rural and Agrarian India Report 2020 (co-authored), among other journal articles, book chapters and public opinion pieces. Her work has been featured on the TEDx platform and through two documentaries (by ScoopWhoop Documentaries and VICE News). She is a recipient of the inaugural Elizabeth Adiseshiah Memorial Award (2019), the New India Fellowship (2010) and is a core group member of the Network of Rural and Agrarian Studies (NRAS).

Helen Anne Curry (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA) — Commentator
Helen Anne Curry is Melvin Kranzberg Professor in the History of Technology at the School of History and Sociology, Georgia Institute of Technology. She is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, where she leads the multi-researcher project, From Collection to Cultivation: Historical Perspectives on Crop Diversity and Food Security with funding from the Wellcome Trust. She is author of Evolution Made to Order: Plant Breeding and Technological Innovation in Twentieth Century America (2016) and Endangered Maize: Industrial Agriculture and the Crisis of Extinction (2022).

Du Xinhao (Chinese Academy of Sciences, China) — Commentator
Du Xinhao is an Associate Professor at the Institute for the History of Natural Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Deputy Secretary-General of the Chinese Agricultural History Society. His research interest focuses on the agricultural and environmental history of late imperial China. He is also the author of two books (in Chinese): Golden Liquid: The Fertilizer Knowledge and Technical Practice in Traditional China (10-19th Century) (2018) and Agronomy Knowledge in Daily-use Books in the Mid and Late Ming Dynasty (2023).

Francesca Bray (University of Edinburgh, UK) — Author
Francesca Bray is a historian of agriculture, and of science, technology and medicine in pre-modern China. Her first book, the Agriculture volume in Joseph Needham’s series Science and Civilisation in China, was published in 1984. Her latest book, Moving Crops and the Scales of History (co-authored with Barbara Hahn, John Bosco Lourdusamy and Tiago Saraiva), came out earlier this year.

Barbara Hahn (Texas Tech University, USA) — Author
Barbara Hahn is a Professor of History at Texas Tech University. She studies and teaches southern history and global history, agriculture, the history of capitalism and the history of technology. She is the author of Making Tobacco Bright: Creating an American Commodity, 1617-1937 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011) and the co-author of The Cotton Kings: Capitalism and Corruption in Turn-of-the-Century New York and New Orleans (Oxford University Press, 2016). She is also the author of Technology in the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Her research has been supported by the Harvard Business School, the Business History Conference and the Economic History Association, the National Humanities Center, The International Congress for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, and a Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship to the European Union, among others.

John Bosco Lourdusamy (IIT Madras, India) — Author
John Bosco Lourdusamy is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Science, Indian Institute of Technology Madras. He obtained his doctorate from the University of Oxford for his thesis on Science and National Consciousness: A Study of the Response to Modern Science in Colonial Bengal, 1870-1930. He was also a Queen Elizabeth Visiting Scholar to the Department of History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. He is the author of three books: Science and National Consciousness in Bengal, 1870-1930 (2004), Religion and Modern Science in Colonial Bengal, 1870-1940 (2007) and Gandhian Knowledge Economy (2010). His currents areas of interest and research fall broadly under the rubric of Science, Technology and Society. He has particular interest in the area of ICT and Development.

Tiago Saraiva (Drexel University, USA) — Author
Tiago Saraiva is an Associate Professor of History at Drexel University, co-editor of the journal History and Technology, and a member of the new Cambridge History of Technology editorial team. His book Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism (MIT Press, 2016) was awarded the Pfizer Prize for the best scholarly book in 2017. He has served as a research fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon, a visiting professor at UCLA and UC Berkeley, and a member of the research team Moving Crops at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG). He recently co-edited Nature Remade (University of Chicago Press, 2021) and Capital Científica (Imprensa Ciências Sociais, 2019). In addition, he is co-author of Inventing a European Nation (2021) and Moving Crops and the Scales of History (Yale University Press, 2023).

Gonçalo Santos (University of Coimbra) — Chair and Moderator
Gonçalo Santos is an anthropologist and STS scholar, specializing in China and in the study of the history of anthropology. He is currently an auxiliary professor of socio-cultural anthropology in the Department of Life Sciences, and a Researcher and Group Coordinator in the Research Center for Anthropology and Health (CIAS), at the University of Coimbra. He is the author of Chinese Village Life Today (2021) and the co-editor of Transforming Patriarchy (2017). He is the founder and the director of the international research network Sci-Tech Asia.