Aparajita Majumdar

Aparajita Majumdar is Assistant Professor of History and Environment and Society at Brown University. She is an environmental historian specializing in failed commodity crops, multispecies ethnography, climate change, colonial and Indigenous notions of borderlands, and heritage in South Asia. She is the author of “The Colonial State and Resource Frontiers: Tracing the Politics of Appropriating Rubber in the Northeastern Frontier of British India, 1810-84” (2016) and “Recalcitrant Lifeworlds of a Tree: Decolonizing the History of Human-Plant Relations.” Her current book project, Planting Recalcitrance: Nature, Knowledge and Heritage in a South Asian Borderland, studies how Ficus elastica, a ‘failed’ rubber crop from the plantations of nineteenth-century British India, became indispensable to the shaping of Indigenous lifeworlds in the Khasi hills of India-Bangladesh borderlands.