People

Samiksha Sehrawat

Dr Samiksha Sehrawat is Senior Lecturer in South Asian History, and their research interests are Gender, Race, Medicine, and Development. Samiksha’s new research explores the fashioning of expertise in colonial development by white women doctors, who linked maternal mortality with development in the late-colonial period. Their first book, Colonial Medical Care in North India (OUP, 2013), emerged from research on gender and medical philanthropy funded by the British Academy. Samiksha’s current research explores the colonial hospital as a vital site in the creation of biomedical health infrastructure in South Asia. This research, supported by the Leverhulme Trust, provides an ambitious inter-disciplinary examination of the imbricated histories of colonialism and biomedicine ranging from social anxieties about colonial biopolitics to the mixed economy of colonial medical care. It charts the epistemic contestation of biomedical authority by colonized patients and the construction of South Asian professional identities based on credentialism.

Samiksha has been an elected Executive Committee Member of the Society for the Social History of Medicine (2015-23), member of the Social History of Medicine editorial board and of the AHRC peer review college. 

Samiksha offers supervision on all aspects of social history of medicine, the British Empire, South Asia and the global south more broadly.