Lauren Nauta Minsky

Assistant Professor, Advisor

Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania

B.A., University of Pennsylvania

Research Interests

Lauren Minsky’s research interests lie at the intersection of medical, environmental, and agrarian South Asian history.  Her primary concern is to understand why people from different social groups get sick, how they experience their illnesses, and how they work to get well.  She pays special attention to issues of seasonal labor, migration, hunger, and co-morbidity, and to the role that sick people and their kin play in making healers and healing practices effective. 

Her current book project, tentatively titled Negotiating Cures: Seasonality, Specialization, and the Crafting of Effective Healing in Colonial Punjab, is a social and environmental history of medicine that challenges conventional understandings of medical traditions and therapeutic pluralism in colonial India.  She plans to write her second book about human and animal health, inequality, and the commercialization of agriculture in South Asia.

Teaching Interests

Professor Minsky’s teaching interests include the fields of modern South Asia; world history; Asian and world environmental history; and the history of health and medicine in the Indian Ocean region.