Swarnabh Ghosh is a geographer and historian. He recently defended his dissertation, “Value in Motion: Infrastructure, Perenniality, and the Production of Punjab, 1870-1940,” at Harvard University. The dissertation examines the entwined geographies of steam power, perennial irrigation, and agrarian capitalism in northwestern India—and the western Indian Ocean—in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and develops a new interpretation of the relation between fossil-fueled circulation and the political economy of agricultural production.

He has two interrelated sets of research and teaching interests: (1) the political economy and ecologies of urbanization and (2) the history of infrastructure from the nineteenth century to the present, with an empirical focus on South Asia and the Indian Ocean world.

In addition to a monograph based on his dissertation, he is currently working on a book project with Neil Brenner on the relationship between urbanization, fossil energy, and biospheric collapse. His broader research interests include political ecology, international political economy, state theory, and the history of global capitalism. 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 PhD in Urban History and Planning, with a secondary degree in Science, Technology, and Society (STS) from Harvard University, a Master of Philosophy in Urban Studies (with distinction) from the University of Cambridge, where he studied as a Bass Scholar, and a Master of Architecture from Yale University. Prior to entering academia, Swarnabh worked at the interdisciplinary studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro in New York City, where he worked on projects spanning art, media, and architecture.