Dr Aviroop Sengupta is a historian of science and the environment, researching the careers of the biological sciences in colonial and early post-colonial India. His current monograph project tracks the emergence, proselytization and eventual failure of several models for an allegedly distinct ‘Indian biology’ between the 1870s and the 1960s, each of which based their claims to heterodoxy around alternate and controversial interpretations of the meanings and mechanisms of evolution, ecology and life itself. This search for an ‘Indian biology,’ he argues, cut widely across racial, political and disciplinary lines, responded variably to institutional and epistemological rivalries, and materialized mutually incompatible scientific practices around competing research objects, methodological orientations, ideological leanings and notions of expertise. His other interests include the political ecology of the Sundarbans delta and vernacular traditions of natural history writing in the subcontinent.

Aviroop has a PhD in South Asian Studies from Columbia University, an MA and an MPhil in Modern History from Jawaharlal Nehru University, and a BA in History from Presidency College, Kolkata. Before joining the Moturi Satyanarayana Centre at Krea, he finished a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University.