Dr. Somak Biswas

Biography

Somak Biswas is a Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Fellow and Affiliated Lecturer at the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge. His research primarily focuses on the intersections of race, sexuality, and migration in twentieth-century Britain and South Asia. Currently, he is working on a project that examines how the HIV/AIDS crisis generated new anxieties around Black South Asian mobilities in late twentieth-century Britain, highlighting the influence of British border practices. He is also interested in how race and ethnicity have shaped British AIDS activism and contributed to the evolution of Black South Asian rights discourse. His scholarship includes contributions to a special issue he co-edited, entitled 'Transnational HIV/AIDS Activism in Europe: 1990-2000', published in the Journal of the History of Sexuality. Somak holds a MA and MPhil from Jawaharlal Nehru University in India and a PhD from the University of Warwick in the UK. He has taken part in various academic initiatives, including co-convening the Labour History Cluster and the Modern British History Reading Group, and has previously taught on modules related to Race and Empire in Modern British History. His book, 'Passages India: Indian Gurus, Western Disciples, Politics of Indophilia', published by Cambridge University Press in 2023, explores the phenomenon of western Indophilia and its implications for cultural and racial hierarchies. His work has been recognized with the Gladstone Book Prize in 2024.

Research Interests