Biography

Prof. (Dr.) Samiparna Samanta comes to JGLS from Georgia College and State University (GCSU) in Milledgeville, USA where she worked as a tenured Associate Professor of History. She studied history of science and medicine at Florida State University where she received her MA and Ph.D. She received her BA in History at Presidency College, Calcutta, and an MA in History from the University of Calcutta. She worked in Calcutta as a Junior Research Fellow (UGC-NET-JFR) before she moved to the United States for her doctoral studies.

Samiparna’s research interests lie at the intersection of the history of science and medicine, colonialism, and non-human animals, with a focus on late 19^th and early 20^th century Bengal. Her recent monograph, Meat, Mercy, and Morality: Animals and Humanitarianism in Colonial Bengal 1850-1920 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2021) disentangles complex discourses around humanitarianism to understand the nature of British colonialism in India. As part of her ongoing research, Samiparna has presented her scholarship at major international conferences including the Association for Asian Studies (AAS), the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH), at South Asia Annual Colloquiums at the Universities of Wisconsin-Madison, Chicago, and Yale, among others. She has spoken at invited talks/lectures in universities across the world including the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, the Center for Medical Humanities at the University of Hong Kong, and Ashoka University, to name a few.

Samiparna has been a successful teacher for more than a decade. In addition to teaching survey courses on world societies and modern South Asia, she has taught a spatially and thematically diverse range of courses on the history of science, Islam across the Indian Ocean, the British Empire, historical research, and methods. She has received several teaching awards, including the Joe Wright Award for Excellence in Teaching at the Florida State University in 2012. At JGU, she has been teaching courses on law and the British Empire, in addition to offering electives that seek to situate the ‘historical film’ within the narrative of world history.

Samiparna is currently working on two book projects – one, a co-edited volume (under contract with Routledge) that interrogates the technologies of knowledge and its impact in structuring lives in modern South Asia as shaped through the experience of empire and post-colonialism. Her second book project investigates the lives of human cadavers to write a history of the anatomical body. Additionally, she is the editor at Age of Revolutions, a leading online open-access journal.