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Aparajita Majumdar is an Assistant Professor specializing in environmental history with a focus on failed commodity crops, multispecies ethnography, and climate change, particularly in colonial and Indigenous contexts within South Asia. Her current book project, titled 'Planting Recalcitrance: Nature, Knowledge, Heritage in the South Asian Borderland', analytically explores Ficus elastica—the 'failed' rubber crop plantations of nineteenth-century British India. This project seeks to understand how these plantations influenced Indigenous lifeworlds in the Khasi hills along the India-Bangladesh border. The region, noted for its extreme climate and extractive economies, provides a unique lens on the socio-ecological impacts of extraction and development. Majumdar employs a range of methodologies including archival research, ethnographic fieldwork, and participatory GIS to examine the relationships between Indigenous communities and their ecological contexts. She has been awarded several fellowships and grants, highlighting her contributions to the field of environmental history, including the 2023-2024 Charlotte Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship and the Andrew W. Mellon Graduate Fellowship. Her teaching includes courses on environmental pressures in South Asia, reflecting her commitment to educating future scholars in this vital area of study.
Brown University • Providence, RI
Teaching and conducting research in environmental history with a focus on South Asia.
Department: Department of Economics