Swarnabh Ghosh is a geographer and historian. He is a PhD candidate in urban history and planning with a secondary field in Science, Technology, and Society (STS) at Harvard University. He has two interrelated sets of research and teaching interests: (1) the political economy and ecologies of urbanization and (2) the historical geography of capitalism and its infrastructures from the nineteenth century to the present, with an empirical focus on South Asia and the Indian Ocean world. His dissertation examines the entwined geographies of fossil energy, perennial irrigation, and agrarian capitalism in northwestern India—and the broader western Indian Ocean—from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries, and develops a new historical interpretation of the “long” agrarian crisis.

He has published extensively on the economic and environmental geographies of capitalist urbanization and on theoretical and methodological questions in the critical social sciences. He is currently working on a collaborative research project with Neil Brenner on the relationship between the historical geographies of capitalist urbanization, fossil energy, and biospheric collapse. His broader research interests include political ecology, agrarian political economy, state theory, urban theory, and the history of economic thought.

His recent work has appeared in Critical Historical Studies, Development and Change, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, and the Journal of Agrarian Change. Swarnabh holds a Master of Architecture from Yale University and an M.Phil. in Urban Studies from the University of Cambridge.