Gourav Krishna Nandi

Gourav is a historian of public health with particular focus on health policy, public health and the politics of refugee health and rehabilitation in postcolonial South Asia. In his research, he explores the politics of public health governance in 1950s India, the first decade after independence, and examines competing approaches to local and national health policies, social and moral discourses of hygiene, and the lived experiences of the urban poor and refugees with housing, food, and diseases. His book project is a history of postcolonial approaches to both national and urban health in India within the broader contours of the Cold War that examines the formation of national health policy in 1950s, as well as concomitant state interventions in the lives of the urban poor and contested forms of belonging in the early postcolonial state.

Gourav received his PhD in History of science and medicine at Yale in 2022, following which he worked as a consultant for the Boston Consulting Group. Earlier, he completed an MPhil in history and philosophy of science at the University of Cambridge, during which he worked on the post-Cold War politics of India’s polio eradication campaign.