Eric Hobsbawm Lecture
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck Clore Management Centre
Famine, Food and Dangerous Diets:
South Asia c 1866-2005
Joya Chatterji FBA is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Emeritus Professor of South Asian Studies at the Faculty of History at Cambridge, she edited Modern Asian Studies from 2010 until her retirement. The author of many works on partition, refugees, border-making and citizenship, her most recent book -- Shadows at Noon, 2023 – touches on the impact of famine, starvation, and the carbohydrate diet on South Asian bodies.
Famine, Food and Dangerous Diets considers the impact of the series of ‘great famines’ of the late nineteenth century for South Asians in the century that followed. It made the bodies of the present, the silent epidemic of malnutrition, and widespread diabetic disease. She suggests that the famines of that era were no passing events. They changed South Asia for ever through that most intimate commodity: food.
Contact name:
Department of History, Classics and Archaeology