Kavita Sivaramakrishnan

Kavita Sivaramakrishnan, Associate Professor of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health, studies the politics of health, medicine, and science in South Asia and the broader global South, with research spanning colonial-era Ayurvedic medicine, social histories of epidemics like the plague, and the global politics of aging. Her current work examines the history of consumption and disease risk in South Asia, alongside collaborative projects on heart disease and the making of medical expertise in India, and cultures of aging and cognitive decline in India and South Africa.

In Paris, Sivaramakrishnan will consult the Pasteur Institute archives for research on the afterlives of the plague in postcolonial Asia, and develop a new collaborative project with Joelle Abi-Rached on war, epidemics, and crisis in the Middle East and Asia.