Arunabh Ghosh

Arunabh Ghosh is a historian of modern China, with research and teaching interests that span the social, economic, and intellectual histories of twentieth century China, transnational histories of science and statecraft, and Sino-Indian history.

Ghosh’s current in-progress book manuscript investigates how the early PRC state built statistical capacity to know the nation through numbers. He has conducted research for this project in Beijing, Guangzhou, New Delhi, and Kolkata, and his work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Andrew F. Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, and Columbia University. Ghosh is additionally interested in applying digital methods, in particular text mining and bibliometric analysis, to the study of the early People’s Republic. To that end, he has been involved with the Fairbank Center’s Digital China Initiative and is collaborating with our past and current An Wang Postdoctoral Fellows, Paul Vierthaler and Donald Sturgeon. Future research projects include a history of dam construction in twentieth century China and a series of essays on 1950s China-India history.