Upcoming Seminar Talk with Benjamin Siegel (Boston University)

CASI, in partnership with the South Asia Center, PDRI-DevLab, and the Political Science Department, is pleased to host Benjamin Siegel, Associate Professor of History at Boston University.

Topic: Automatic for the People? Labor, Machines, and Ecology in Modern India
Date: Thursday, March 20, 2025
Time: 12:00 PM
Location: 133 South 36th Street (Suite 230), Philadelphia, PA 19104

About the Speaker:
Benjamin Siegel is an Associate Department Chair; Associate Professor of History at Boston University. He is a scholar of transnational economic life, politics, agriculture, and the environment. His work examines how people in modern states conceptualize, debate, and leverage their material and non-material resources, returning frequently to a geographic focus on South Asia and its entanglements with the wider world. Professor Siegel’s latest book, The Ghost Ship: Pharmaceutical Opioids and Political Power in the Modern World, is forthcoming in 2025 from Oxford University Press. The book offers a new account of how opium, a quintessential colonial commodity, was remade into a twentieth-century resource for modern medicine in the global north and state-building and national development in the global south. His first book, Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India (Cambridge University Press, 2018), demonstrated how questions of food and scarcity structured Indian citizens’ understanding of welfare and citizenship in the twentieth century.

For more information, please visit: https://casi.sas.upenn.edu/events/gaurav-khanna