Dr. Abhijit Sarkar became a post-doctoral research associate with the Visual Representations of the Third Plague Pandemic in January 2018, as a historian and anthropologist of disasters, both human and natural.
He obtained his doctorate from the University of Oxford, Oxford, UK, where he was a Clarendon Scholar, and Vice President for Academic Affairs of St Antony’s College GCR. His doctoral research was on the history of the politics of humanitarianism in the particular form of famine-relief, and the politics of food-austerity laws and civil rationing in late colonial and independent India. A book-manuscript on the same subject is now under contract with Routledge Publishing, forthcoming in 2018.
He is currently working on the Third Plague Pandemic in India, with a particular focus on plague hospitals and disposal of plague corpses. Abhijit has also finished background research for his next study in environmental history; a long-term history of earthquakes and earthquake-relief in South Asia.
Abhijit acts as a peer-reviewer for the journal South Asian History and Culture (Routledge Publishing), and as a book-reviewer for Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (Cambridge University Press).
Research information
Abhijit won research-funding of approximately a quarter of a million British Pounds to carry out his research. He obtained funding from the Clarendon Fund of the University of Oxford, and from many other UK bodies, including the Institute of Historical Research, Past and Present Society, Economic History Society, and the Royal Historical Society. He was also awarded full funding by the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust at the University of Cambridge (declined), by Trinity College, Cambridge (declined), and by the University of Heidelberg in Germany (declined).
If you have a query about Abhijit’s work, you can email him here. Questions about the Visual Plague project can be addressed to the administrator. You can find more information on the contact page.
Visual Representations of the 3rd Plague Pandemic 