Department of History

Aparajita Majumdar specializes in the field of environmental humanities in South Asia. Her interests circle around four issues: historical significance of failed crops, multispecies history and ethnography, colonial and Indigenous notions of borderlands, and heritage. In particular, she studies how Ficus elastica, a ‘failed’ rubber crop from the plantations of nineteenth-century British India, became indispensable to the shaping of Indigenous lifeworlds in the India-Bangladesh borderlands. As the rainiest place on earth, the Khasi hills in India connected to the floodplains of Sylhet in Bangladesh, represent an extraordinary borderland ecology shaped by extreme climates, extractive economies and Indigenous regenerative practices. Through archival research, ethnographic fieldwork, and participatory GIS, Aparajita studies the socio-ecological impact of extraction and development in these colonial and postcolonial borderlands, alongside the regenerative human-plant relations of Indigenous communities.

Recently Aparajita's dissertation, ‘Planting Recalcitrance: Nature, Knowledge, and Heritage in a South Asian Borderland,’ was awarded the 2024 Messenger Chalmers Prize at Cornell University. Prior to her doctorate in History from Cornell, she earned an MPhil in Modern History from Jawaharlal Nehru University and an MA in History from the University of Delhi. Her writings have appeared in journals like Environmental Humanities (Duke University Press, 2024), Indian Historical Review (Sage Publications, 2016) and an edited volume Objects and Frontiers in Modern Asia: Between the Mekong and the Indus (Routledge, 2019). Aparajita's teaching reflects her interests in explaining environmental issues in the Global South through interdisciplinary approaches. At Brown in Fall 2024, she will be offering an upper-division seminar on the environmental histories of South Asia.