Pratik Chakrabarti

Biography

Pratik is a Chair in History of Science and Medicine, at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester. 

Pratik joined the University in 2015. Previously he was a Reader in History at the School of History, University of Kent. He joined Kent as a Wellcome Lecturer in History of Modern Medicine in 2006. Prior to that, he was a Research Fellow at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Oxford, UK (2002-2006).

Pratik received his PhD from the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India in 2000. He taught in India, before coming to the UK.  

Pratik has contributed widely to the history of science, medicine, and global and imperial history, spanning South Asian, Caribbean and Atlantic history from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. He has published four sole-authored monographs and several research articles in leading international journals on the history of science and medicine. 

Beyond research and publication, Pratik has attracted research funding and have secured a number of large and smaller grants for my research. He joined the University of Kent with the Wellcome Trust University Award (£218,000, in 2006), for his project on laboratory research in British India. In 2012, He was awarded the Leverhulme Trust project grant (£221,444) for his project; ‘An Antique Land; Geology, Philology and the Making of the Indian Subcontinent, 1830-1920’.

In between these major projects, Pratik has also conducted research on the cultural and social history of water in India, parts of which was published an article: ‘Purifying the River: Pollution and Purity of Water in Colonial Calcutta’. This forms the core of his future project on the history of water in the global south.

Pratik has received international recognition for his research. Since 2010, he has been one of the editors of the leading peer-reviewed journal, Social History of Medicine, published by the Oxford University Press. In this role, he has sought to expand the scope of the journal in global and imperial histories. He also sat on the editorial boards of other journals in the history of science and medicine. He has been invited to present papers at colloquia in UK, India, Japan, USA and Europe on the history of science/medicine, globalization and ecological history.

Biology, Medicine and Health (BMH) Domains

• Population Health & Ecosystems