Negotiating Infection and Immunity: Ecologies of Care, Difference and Labor in a Colonial Pandemic

Kavita Sivaramakrishnan is Associate Professor, Sociomedical Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University; and is affiliated closely with the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health, the Center for Science and Society, the South Asia Institute at Columbia University. She has been trained in history, political theory and in public health, and studied at St Stephens College, Delhi; Trinity College, Cambridge University, Jawaharlal Nehru University and at the Center for Population and Development Studies at Harvard University. She is a historian of public health and science in South Asia; and is deeply interested in the politics of global health. She has published, Old Potions, New Bottles (2006) and her recent book is titled, As the World Ages: The making of a demographic Crisis (HUP, 2018). Her current work focuses on histories of immunity, hygiene and the public, and the politics of risk and making of expert knowledge from a South Asian and global, comparative perspective; and also works on loneliness among older populations. She is also co-leading a project on COVID-19 and its social networks and politics in New York city supported by the National Science Foundation; and is Director of the Yusuf Hamied Program at Columbia.