COVID Roundtable: Pandemic Biopolitics, Ruptures, and Risks Available to Purchase

Sunil Amrith is Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History at Yale University. He is a historian of South and Southeast Asia, and his work has covered environmental history and the history of public health. Amrith is the author of four books, most recently Unruly Waters: How Rains, Rivers, Coasts, and Seas Have Shaped Asia's History (Basic Books, 2018). He is a 2017 MacArthur Fellow and received the Infosys Prize in Humanities in 2016.

Omar Dewachi is an associate professor of medical anthropology at Rutgers University. His book Ungovernable Life: Mandatory Medicine and Statecraft in Iraq documents the untold history of the rise and fall of Iraq’s health care under decades of US-led interventions. His forthcoming manuscript, “When Wounds Travel,” chronicles close to ten years of ethnographic research and public health work on war and displacement across East of the Mediterranean.

Julie Livingston is Silver Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University. She is interested in the body as a mode of experience, taxonomies and relations that challenge them, African thought and moral imagination, relations between species, and the public health consequences of capitalism. Her most recent publications include Self-devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable told from Southern Africa (Duke University Press, 2019) and Collateral Afterworlds (coedited with Zoe Wool), a special issue of Social Text. Livingston is a member of the NYU Prison Education Program Research Collective researching carceral debt: https://wp.nyu.edu/nyu_debt_project/.

Kavita Sivaramakrishnan is a public health historian of South Asia with a focus on the politics of health, medicine, and science in the global South. Her most recent research is on the global politics of aging, and she has published a book titled As the World Ages: Rethinking a Demographic Crisis (Harvard University Press, 2018). She is currently engaged in a new book and research projects on the history of pollution and environmental risks in South Asia, and on a history of epidemic outbreaks and links with mobility, borders, and boundaries in South and East Asia. She is a member of the editorial collective of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

Banu Subramaniam is a professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Trained as a plant evolutionary biologist, Banu engages the feminist studies of science in the practices of experimental biology. She is the author of Holy Science: The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism (University of Washington Press, 2019), Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity (University of Illinois Press, 2014), and coeditor of MEAT! A Transnational Analysis (Duke University Press, 2021). Banu's current work focuses on decolonizing botany and the relationship of science and religious nationalism in India.