Arunabh Ghosh 郭旭光
Arunabh Ghosh is a historian of modern China, with research and teaching interests in social and economic history, history of science and statecraft, environmental history, transnational history, and China-India history.
Ghosh’s first book, Making it Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the early People's Republic of China (Princeton University Press, 2020), investigates how the early PRC state built statistical capacity to know the nation through numbers. He has conducted research for the book 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, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Columbia University. For a discussion of some of the book's major themes, check out this essay in Aeon: "Counting China". Some of the research has also appeared in Osiris, BJHS Themes, and the Harvard Data Science Review. For more about the book, check out the "Making it Count" tab above.
Ghosh is currently working on a book on the history of small hydropower in the People's Republic of China titled "The Significance of Small Things: Hydropower and Rural Energy in China." The book charts the dramatic investment the People’s Republic of China made in small hydropower—defined as stations smaller than 500 kW—during its first four decades (1949-1989). The nearly 90,000 small hydropower stations extant by the early 1980s dwarfed the number of stations in the rest of the world put together. By exploring how these developments affected people, the countryside, and the environment, "The Significance of Small Things" argues that a focus on large dams in the historiography and in the popular imagination has obscured the foundational role of small hydropower in rural development and local political economy in China. Beyond China Studies, the book will establish the role of small hydropower in global histories of energy, while also offering insights into questions of scale and development. A recent article in Comparative Studies in Society and History explores some of the book's principal themes. Other related work has appeared in History and Technology and is forthcoming in Environment and History. "The Significance of Small Things" is under contract with Stanford University Press.
Ghosh is also at work on a third book titled "Trans-Himalayan Encounters: Science and Technology between China and India." For related publications, see these articles in the Journal of Asian Studies, the International Journal of Asian Studies, and BJHS Themes. Ghosh is a co-PI, along with Tansen Sen (NYU Shanghai) and Gal Gvili (McGill), on an NEH-funded collaborative project on the China-related materials within the Jawaharlal Nehru Papers, 1947-1964.
Other academic writing has appeared in the American Historical Review, Isis, EASTS, and the PRC History Review.
Ghosh's graduate offerings include research seminars and pro-seminars on different aspects of twentieth century Chinese history, Asian environmental history, economics and history, and histories of infrastructure. He offers examination fields in Modern Chinese History. At the undergraduate level, he regularly offers a survey lecture on Modern China (1894-Present) and teaches conference courses on large-scale technological and social engineering projects in post-imperial China and on the economic history of modern China.
Trained at Haverford College and at Tsinghua and Columbia Universities, Ghosh joined the History Department in 2015 from the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, where he was a Postdoctoral Scholar for the 2014-15 AY.