Biography

Prof. (Dr.) Samiparna Samanta comes to JGLS from Georgia College and State University (GCSU) in Milledgeville, USA, where she served as a tenured Associate Professor of History. She studied history of science and medicine at Florida State University, where she received her MA and Ph.D. She earned a BA in History at Presidency College, Calcutta, and an MA in History from the University of Calcutta. She began her academic career as a Junior Research Fellow (UGC-NET-JRF) in Calcutta before moving to the United States for her doctoral studies. 

Samiparna’s research interests lie at the intersection of the history of science and medicine, colonialism, and the British Empire. Her first monograph, Meat, Mercy, and Morality: Animals and Humanitarianism in Colonial Bengal, disentangles complex discourses around humanitarianism to understand the nature of British colonialism in India. Her second book, an edited volume titled Technologies of Knowledge in Modern South Asia, examines the critical role of technology in shaping, curating, disseminating, and archiving knowledge and life in South Asia, as reflected through the experiences of empire and postcolonialism. She is currently working on her third book project, "The Mortal and the Spectral", which investigates the lives of human cadavers to write a history of the anatomical and spectral body in nineteenth and twentieth-century Bengal and Madras. 

Samiparna has been a successful teacher for more than a decade. In addition to teaching survey courses on world societies and modern South Asia, she has taught a spatially and thematically diverse range of courses both in the United States and India on the history of science, Islam across the Indian Ocean, the British Empire, historical research and methods. She has received several teaching awards, including the Joe Wright Award for Excellence in Teaching at the Florida State University in 2012. At JGU, she teaches courses on legal history, modern South Asia, in addition to offering electives on the birth of the modern world. 

She is the editor at Age of Revolutions, a leading online open-access journal.