In January of this year, Professor Aditya Ramesh joined the faculty of the Department of History as a historian of South Asia and environmental history. He came to us from the University of Manchester in England where he had spent the last three years teaching as a presidential fellow in environmental history. We caught up with him recently to see how he is adjusting to Seattle and to learn a bit more about him.
What have been your first impressions of Seattle? What do you like the most about the city so far and what is the hardest to adapt to? Did you have a cultural shock moving here from the UK? What do you miss the most in Seattle?
Thank you so much for inviting me to do this interview! My first impression of Seattle was from the airplane; the view was spectacular. And when I was interviewing, the cherry blossoms were all out, but I barely noticed! I only recently got to appreciate them fully. I like the spectacular views the city offers (mountains, lakes, trees--you name it), its vibrant food scene, and the coffee culture here is spectacular. I miss Turkish and Indian food, though, which are much better in the UK. Living in London, life was always on the go, which I miss sometimes and don’t miss at others! As for culture shock, I’ve lived in and visited America several times before, so, as such, no culture shock, yet the number of parking lots never fails to shock me!
Is this your first time teaching at a U.S. university? How do your teaching experiences here differ from your past teaching in the UK?
I think about this all the time! To sum it up, students in Britain are less vocal and trained in writing, and students in the U.S. are trained in oral skills and less so in writing. More broadly though, the similarities between my students at the University of Manchester and here are striking--all are very smart and dedicated students.
You taught a class called “Medicine, History and Society: From Cholera to COVID-19: A Global History of Epidemics” during your first quarter. That's a very relevant topic! How did the class go? What went well and what would you change in the future? Were students able to relate their own experiences to past events?
The class met at 8:30 a.m., so you can imagine how that went. More seriously, though, I found it really interesting as most of my students were from public/global health. In the UK, I usually only taught history/politics/economics/sociology students, so this was a new experience in pedagogy. The students brought an entirely different perspective, sometimes from the clinic and the field, into the classroom, which was brilliant. We worked with archives, historical maps, images, and a range of secondary sources on pandemics across the centuries. The course was a blend of understanding key moments in the history of medicine (think Pasteur and pasteurization or John Snow and cholera) while placing those in the context of French and British colonialism. In sum, these two processes are not separable. Students did bring in their own experiences of living through the COVID-19 pandemic, so we were able to contrast these lived experiences with past pandemics--we even saw how historians had commented extensively on the contemporary moment. I think next time I teach the course, though, I will give fewer writing assignments!
This quarter you are teaching “Divided Lands/Divided Lives: An Environmental History of South Asia.” Could you tell us a bit more about the class? Are your students mainly history majors or do they from other departments? Does a course in environmental history specifically attract students who are in the sciences?
This is a great question. The course was initially developed by Professor Purnima Dhavan, who has taught this course a number of times throughout the years. I am structuring it my own way, of course, and am largely drawing from familiar themes in South Asian environmental history, namely forests, water, environmental ideology and movements, industrial disasters, and cities. Within this framework, however, we have been able to do quite substantial work on theoretical approaches, e.g. the colonial watershed theory, environmentality, etc., while also paying attention to how the environmental past in South Asia shapes its present. We managed to even link the Indian wedding of a billionaire heir (one where Rhianna performed but got the name of the bride wrong) to ideology around wildlife species conservation. Go figure!
The students in the course are a mix--some from history, some from area studies and the Jackson School of International Studies, and several from environmental studies. I think we have a pretty large cohort of environmental studies majors from what I understand, so this is a potential market for environmental historians to tap into. There is also hopefully a new minor in environmental justice taking shape, which will add to that.
What is environmental history? And how did you come to see yourself as an environmental historian? When you applied to grad school, did you already know that this was your research focus or did you develop this gradually over time?
Wow, there is a lot there! Environmental history is, for me, simply to account for what "the natural" means. The amazing thing is that there are so many interpretations, and the task of teaching environmental history is to put the range of perspectives, historically, out there to students. Interestingly in grad school, like many historians of South Asia, I started as a historian of land settlements. I ended up, however, realizing that, in the 20th century, discussions surrounding water created much more noise, and that is how I stumbled into the field of environmental history. It is a deeply interdisciplinary field and is sometimes faced with rapidly transforming environments. I wonder if environmental history is even a field or if we need a better term for what we do.
Looking ahead, what are some ideas that you have for upcoming research projects?
My doctoral work largely focused on the intersection of agrarian history, water, and social groups. Moving forward, I am switching gears a little to cities and epidemics. I’m framing this very much within what beloved UW History professor Linda Nash called “landscapes of exposure”. I’m looking into what types of exposures were afforded in the dense, sprawling, and largely informal urban environments of South Asia. I have finished bits of this work, for instance an article on the bubonic plague and some public writing on fly-ash contamination, but there is a long way to go.
And finally, could you share a past research experience with us that sticks in your memory? Maybe a specific find in an archive or the most puzzling or mind-blowing discovery from your career so far?
Wow, this is again a great question. I am such an archive person. The archives are a delight, and I could spend days lodged in them. But I think my most important discovery has been surrounding recently released documents. In India where I do my work, state archives typically have a 50-year embargo period on their materials. This can be haphazard, though, especially in regional archives. In these newly released documents, I recently discovered a visual archive showing fossil fuel waste being dumped into the sea and backwaters, which was a spectacular but disturbing find.
You can learn more about Prof. Ramesh and his research by visiting his faculty profile on the UW History website.