Aparajita Majumdar specializes in the field of environmental humanities in South Asia with specific interests 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. Through archival research, ethnographic fieldwork, and participatory GIS, Majumdar studies the socio-ecological impact of extraction and development in these colonial and postcolonial borderlands, alongside the regenerative human-plant relations of Indigenous communities. 

Majumdar's dissertation, "Planting Recalcitrance: Nature, Knowledge, and Heritage in a South Asian Borderland," recently won the 2024 Messenger Chalmers Prize at Cornell University. Prior to her doctorate in Environmental Humanities from Cornell, she earned an MPhil in Modern History from Jawaharlal Nehru University and an MA in History from the University of Delhi.

Majumdar's teaching reflects her interests in explaining environmental issues in the Global South through interdisciplinary approaches. This fall at Brown, she will be offering an upper-division seminar on the environmental histories of South Asia. She can be reached at aparajita_majumdar@brown.edu.

This story was originally published by the Department of History.