Kavita Sivaramakrishnan: On Plagues and Pandemics

Kavita Sivaramakrishnan of Harvard University will be giving a talk on �Plagues and Pandemics: Global Local Politics of Health during the Plague Epidemic in Surat, 1994,� on February 3rd as part of the South Asia Colloquium lecture series. She is a Bell Fellow at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, and she completed her undergraduate education at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University, and Trinity College, University of Cambridge.

Dr. Sivaramakrishnan studied at Trinity College on a Nehru Cambridge Fellowship, where she read Modern History and Political Thought and received an Oxford & Cambridge Society endowment. She then pursued an M.Phil and Ph.D. at the School of Sciences at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Dr. Sivaramakrishnan has been awarded many prestigious fellowships, including the Chevening Fellowship to consult health and medical archives in the U.K., and the Balzan Fellowship to conduct research in social epidemiology at University College, London. Her book, Old Potions, New Bottles: Recasting Indigenous Medicine in Colonial Punjab, was published in the Wellcome Trust and Orient Longman Series on �New Perspectives on the History of Medicine and Environment in South Asia� in May 2006. It has been well received, garnering praise from The London Times Literary Supplement and other academic journals such as The Journal of Medicine and Allied Sciences and The American History Review.

Dr. Sivaramakrishnan�s achievements are not limited to academia, as she is also Senior Program Manager of Academic Programs with the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI), a public private partnership of the Government of India and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This organization strives to build capacity in public health education, standards, research, and advocacy in India. Dr. Sivaramakrishnan�s academic background and institutional experience gives her a unique perspective on issues of health in a historical context.