Projit Mukharji

Projit Mukharji

Fellow: Awarded 2023
Field of Study: History of Science, Technology and Economics

Competition: US & Canada

Projit Bihari Mukharji is a Professor in the Department of History and Sociology of Science at University of Pennsylvania, USA. He is currently a visiting faculty in the Department of History at Ashoka University, India. Educated at Presidency College (Calcutta), JNU (New Delhi) and SOAS (London), Mukharji has also taught at UK and Canadian universities. Mukharji’s first monograph, Nationalizing the Body (Anthem, 2009), explored the way Indians educated in western medicine gradually vernacularized western medicine during the high noon of the British Raj. His next book Doctoring Traditions (UChicago, 2016) mapped a parallel, simultaneous process through which practitioners of traditional Ayurvedic medicine subtly modernized their tradition by incorporating several new technologies. More recently, in Brown Skins, White Masks (UChicago, 2023), Mukharji traced the emergence of geneticized notions of racial difference in India during the late colonial and early postcolonial periods. Deeply committed to bilingual scholarship, Mukharji also writes regularly for Bengali dailies and magazines. Mukharji’s Guggenheim Fellowship project, Psychic Socialism, will trace the forgotten efforts of a group of socialist politicians and ambitious scientists in mid-twentieth century India to craft a new post-imperial science that tapped into and redeployed the psychic capacities of citizens towards building a new egalitarian society.

Photo Credit: Manjita Mukharji

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