Shatam Ray

Photo: Shatam Ray

Lecturer III
Honors Advisor

Email: sray24@unm.edu
Office: 2101

Education:

Ph.D, Department of History, Emory University (2020)
M.A., Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (2009)
B.A., St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi

Research Interests:

Environmental History , History of Labour and Capital , Modern Asian History, Social Theory, History of Science and Technology

Research Statement:

My present book project, Labours of Malwa: Opium, and Environment in the making of Modern Labour Regimes interrogates the agrarian landscape of poppy-cultivation in the 19th and 20th century Malwa, Central India to question how modern technocratic governance in a semi-autonomous region produced the grounds for modern wage labour, ideal agrarian practices and environmental management. I seek to establish Malwa as an illustrative case for larger transformations taking place in cross-imperial spaces that include parts of South, Southeast and East Asia.

Profile:

I am a Lecturer in the Department of History at University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. My research locates the present conjuncture, marked my material and ecological precarity, on a larger historical continuum of colonial world-making.

Courses:

My teaching follows up on some of these themes and invite students to consider what contemporary ecological and labouring imaginations can foster survival practices for an increasingly unruly world. How can human and non-human agencies be reconsidered and how history offers new paradigms for thinking about our present and future. I offer a range of thematic classes (“Environments and Diseases”, “Drugs and Commodities”, “Decolonizing Asia”) as well as Survey Classes (South Asian and Indian History, Eastern Civilizations, I & II) besides the Capstone class in History, HIST 491: Historiography.

 

My classes also deploy a range of interdisciplinary methods and an equally diverse range of learning skills from digital humanities, including (H)GIS, Podcast production, and material studies.


  • Decolonization in Asia

  • Bibliography & Indian History

  • Modern Eastern Civilization

  • Environments and Diseases

  • India as Global History

  • Drugs and Commodities

  • Historiography