معرفی
Arnab Dey is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Binghamton University, part of the Harpur College of Arts and Sciences. His academic work focuses on modern South Asia, with particular expertise in environmental and labor history, political economy, law, and medical history within the context of the British Empire.
Dr. Dey received his PhD and MA from the University of Chicago, and an MPhil, MA, and BA from the University of Delhi. His educational background reflects a deep engagement with both South Asian and Western scholarly traditions that informs his interdisciplinary approach to historical research.
His research interests span multiple interconnected fields including modern South Asia, environmental and labor history, literature and history, social theory, and the British Empire. Dey's work critically examines how colonial economic systems shaped both human societies and ecological landscapes, with particular attention to the tea plantation economy of Assam. His scholarship reveals how these systems manipulated law, labor, politics, and pathogens to serve imperial interests, creating lasting ecological and social consequences that persist to this day.
Dey's publications demonstrate a consistent focus on the intersections of environment, labor, law, and colonial power in South Asia. His work analyzes how tea plantations functioned as sites where ecological constraints, disease environments, legal frameworks, and labor exploitation converged to shape both immediate working conditions and long-term historical trajectories. His research reveals the complex ways in which colonial commodity production transformed landscapes and societies, often with enduring negative consequences.
- Member of the School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, 2025
- Global dis:connect Fellow, Käte Hamburger Research Center, LMU Munich, 2023-24
- Harpur College Faculty Research Grant, 2024-25; 2018-21
- Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities Binghamton University Faculty Fellowship, fall 2024, fall 2018
- Carson Fellowship, Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU Munich, 2016
- Nominated for the Bernard S. Cohn Book Prize by the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) in 2019
Dr. Dey has been actively involved in significant research projects, including his ongoing investigation into conditions of human precarity and ecological "ruin" spawned by early globalization and the Industrial Age. He was an invited faculty fellow at LMU's Käte Hamburger Research Center in Munich in 2023 and will be a member of the Institute for Advanced Study's School of Historical Studies at Princeton in 2025. He welcomes graduate and undergraduate students interested in modern South Asia, bio-colonialism, environmental history, labor studies, medical history, and historical methods.
