Lauren Nauta Minsky

Assistant Professor

Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania

B.A., University of Pennsylvania

262 Withers Hall

Phone: (919) 513-1425

Dr. Minsky is on leave 2009-2010

Research Interests

Lauren Minsky’s research interests lie at the intersection of medical, environmental, and agrarian South Asian history. Her primary concern is to understand why people from different social groups get sick, how they experience their illnesses, and how they work to get well. She pays special attention to issues of seasonal labor, migration, hunger, and co-morbidity, and to the role that sick people and their kin play in making healers and healing practices effective.

Her current book project, tentatively titled Negotiating Cures: Seasonality, Specialization, and the Crafting of Effective Healing in Colonial Punjab, is a social and environmental history of medicine that challenges conventional understandings of medical traditions and therapeutic pluralism in colonial India. She plans to write her second book about human and animal health, inequality, and the commercialization of agriculture in South Asia.

Teaching Interests

Professor Minsky’s teaching interests include the fields of modern South Asia; world history; Asian and world environmental history; and the history of health and medicine in the Indian Ocean region.

Publications

"Pursuing Protection from Disease: The Making of Smallpox Prophylactic Practice in Colonial Punjab," in Bulletin of the History of Medicine Spring 2009,83: 163-189.
Book review: Gunnel Cederlöf, Landscapes and the Law: Environmental Politics, Regional Histories, and Contests Over Nature. Ranikhet, India: Permanent Black, 2008. In Environmental History, forthcoming.
Book review: Joseph Morgan Hodge, Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism. Series in Ecology and History, Ohio University Press. In Journal of British Studies, v.47 no.3 July 2008.
"Re-thinking Therapeutic Efficacy: Environment and Medical Development in Colonial Punjab," in Wellcome History, Issue 34, Spring 2007, p.4-5.

Fellowships and Awards

Mellon Fellowship for Assistant Professors, Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2009-10)
SSRC-ACLS International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF)
Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Research Abroad Fellowship
American Institute of Indian Studies Junior Research Fellowship (declined)
American Institute of Pakistan Studies Junior Research Fellowship (declined)
Title VI Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship
Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies