Arnab Dey is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Binghamton, NY. He also holds an affiliated appointment in the South Asia Program, Cornell University.
His current research examines the interface of ecology, law, and economy in the making of the Assam tea plantations in colonial eastern India. This project looks at the manner in which nature both conditioned and constrained the operation—and character—of this commodity and its production. At the Rachel Carson Center, he will be working on his book manuscript provisionally titled Unkempt Edens: Tea and the Culture of Commerce in Eastern India, 1840–1940. Broadly, his areas of interest span modern South Asia, the environmental humanities, law, and historical methods.
He completed his PhD at the University of Chicago (2012), and received his MPhil and MA from the University of Delhi (2004). He has also held appointments at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, and fellowships from the Andrew Mellon Foundation and the Nicholson Center for British Studies, University of Chicago.
RCC Research Project: Unkempt Edens: Tea and the Culture of Commerce in Eastern India, 1840–1940
Selected Publications:
- Dey, Arnab. “Diseased Plantations: Law and the Political Economy of Health in Assam, 1860–1920.” Modern Asian Studies (forthcoming).
- Dey, Arnab. “Bugs in the Garden: Tea Plantations and Environmental Constraints in Eastern India (Assam), 1840–1910.” Environment and History 21, no. 4 (2015): 537–65.
- Dey, Arnab. Review of Trans-Colonial Modernities in South Asia by Michael Dodson and Brian A. Hatcher, eds. Pacific Affairs 86, no. 3 (Sept. 2013): 659–62.