Sunil Amrith Discusses His Recent MacArthur Fellowship Award

11/16/17 • 17 min

In this episode we speak with Sunil Amrith, Mehra Family Professor of South Asian Studies and Professor of History at Harvard University. He is the author of the 2006 book Decolonizing International Health: South and Southeast Asia, 1930-1965 and the 2011 book Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia. His most recent book, published in 2013, is Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants. Amrith speaks with Pedro Machado who is Associate Professor of History at Indiana University and whose own work focuses on the history of social and commercial connections between western India and southeastern Africa. Their conversation explores Amrith’s most recent book as well as what his recent award might mean for his future research. They begin by discussing Amrith’s AHR article, “Tamil Diasporas across the Bay of Bengal,” which appeared in the June 2009 issue. Read Amrith's article in the AHR: https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.114.3.547 Listeners may also be interested in the December 2016 AHR forum on Amitav Ghosh's "Ibis Trilogy": https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/121.5.1521

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Elizabeth Hinton Discusses Carceral Studies and Scholarly Activism

In this AHR Interview, we speak with Elizabeth Hinton, Assistant Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, about the broad field of carceral studies and the role of activism for scholars of carceral history. Hinton's 2016 book, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America, has been reviewed widely, including in the June 2017 issue of the AHR, and was placed on the list of 100 notable books of 2016 by the New York Times. Hinton speaks with AHR editorial assistant Charlene Fletcher, who is herself completing a dissertation that addresses carceral questions. Before commencing her doctoral studies in history, Fletcher taught criminal justice at the City University of New York and worked on prisoner reentry initiatives for the New York Prison System. The AHR review of Hinton's book, "From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America," is available here: https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/122/3/795/3862795/Elizabeth-Hinton-From-the-War-on-Poverty-to-the?redirectedFrom=fulltext

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AHR Author Vanessa Ogle on the History of Tax Havens, Offshore Money, and the State

Our guest in this episode is Vanessa Ogle. Ogle is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of the 2015 book The Global Transformation of Time: 1870–1950. She is currently researching the topic of tax havens and offshore finance, and a portion of that research appears as an article in the December 2017 issue of the AHR. Its title is “Archipelago Capitalism: Tax Havens, Offshore Money, and the State, 1950s–1970s.” She speaks with AHR associate editor Konstantin Dierks. You can find Ogle’s article at https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/122.5.1431.