Department of English

Suvendu Ghatak is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Florida. Drawing upon medical, administrative and literary sources in English, Bengali, and Hindi, he explores the conjunctures of medical and cultural narratives in obscuring the impact of colonial developmentalist policies on malarial epidemics, and in marking the disease as a malady of primitivity and degeneracy. He traces the continuities of this colonial semantics of malaria in postcolonial state policies and medical practices in South Asia. More broadly, he is interested in how prolonged crises, beyond the suddenness of “outbreak” or the closure of cure, shape disease imaginaries and medical practices in the Global South. His archival research for the dissertation has been funded by the American Institute of Indian Studies, and the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, UF. He has been the recipient of NVSA “Expanding the Field” essay prize in Victorian Studies, and has received the Kumkum Chatterjee Memorial Fellowship in Indian History, at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata. He has published in Volupté, Journal of Comparative Literature in Aesthetics, Synapsis, and Sanglap.