Benjamin Siegel

Visiting Fellow

Benjamin Siegel is a historian of modern South Asia at Boston University, where, as an Assistant Professor of History, he teaches courses on the history of global food politics, poverty and democracy, development, and more. His first book, Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India (Cambridge University Press, 2018) examines how citizens and politicians in India contested the meanings of nation-building and citizenship through debates over food and sustenance, as well as the ways in which the Green Revolution transformed these contestations. While visiting Agrarian Studies in Spring 2019, Ben will work on his second book manuscript, Markets of Pain: The Transnational Origins of the American Opioid Crisis, which, drawing on archival material from India, Turkey, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and connects the rise of working-class pain in the United States to the international political economy of opium production in the latter half of the twentieth century. He received his B.A. from Yale in 2007 and his PhD from Harvard in 2014.

Agrarian Studies Program
Academic Year: 
2018-19