tsuri@fas.harvard.edu

Tara is a historian of science and society in colonial and postcolonial South Asia. Her work draws together histories of medicine, health, and the environment, histories of decolonization and the global Cold War, and histories of race, gender, caste, and sexuality. Her current book project is a global history of South Asia’s biomedical trade in rhesus monkeys. The book follows the transnational conflicts – among monkey dealers and diplomats, pharmaceutical executives and shippers, and epidemiologists and ecologists – that unevenly made rhesus monkeys into scientific models of human bodies in twentieth-century research. In the process, it shows how the racialized geopolitics of colonial rule, Cold War development, and postcolonial state-building have shaped the production of biomedical knowledge.

Tara completed a Ph.D. in History with a certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton University. She received an M.Phil. in Multi-Disciplinary Gender Studies from the University of Cambridge and an A.B. in Social Studies from Harvard College. Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the University Center for Human Values at Princeton, and the Social Sciences Research Council.