2014 Ph.D., Anthropology, University
of California, Berkeley
2007 M.A., Cultural and Social Anthropology, Stanford University
2006 B.A., Cultural and Social Anthropology, Stanford University
Dr. Bharat Jayram Venkat is an
Associate Professor at UCLA with a joint appointment spanning the Institute for Society & Genetics, the Department
of History, and the Department of Anthropology. He is also affiliated with the UCLA Center for India
& South Asia, the Program in Digital Humanities, the Urban Humanities
Initiative, and the Luskin Center for Innovation. His research focuses on a
range of issues related to science, medicine, climate, race, and design.
His first book, At the Limits of Cure (Duke University Press, 2021; Bloomsbury India, 2022), is
the winner of three awards: the RAI Wellcome Medal (from the Royal
Anthropological Institute and the Wellcome Trust), the Edie Turner Book Prize for
Ethnographic Writing (from the Society for Humanistic
Anthropology), and theJoseph W. Elder Prize in the
Indian Social Sciences (from the American
Institute of Indian Studies). It was also shortlisted
for the British Association for South Asian Studies Book Prize and
longlisted for the British Society for the History of Science Hughes Prize.
Through an historical and
ethnographic study of tuberculosis treatment in India, this book asks: what
does it mean to be cured, and what does it mean for a cure to come undone? Venkat details the unraveling of cure across a
variety of sites: in idyllic hill stations and crowded prisons, aboard ships
and on the battlefield, and through research trials and clinical encounters. In confronting our present moment—marked by fading
antibiotic efficacy—this work argues that cures have almost never been as final
as we might hope. This research was funded by the American Council for Learned
Societies, the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the
Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, and the American Institute for Indian Studies.
Dr. Venkat current book project—tentatively
titled Swelter: A History of Our Bodies in a Warming World— is about thermal inequality, the history
of heat, and the fate of our bodies in a swiftly warming world riven by
inequality. This book reflects on the existential
and planetary crisis posed by extreme heat, but from the perspective of our
bodies as they experience this crisis. Through a
surprising history that connects beer and bananas to heat stress experiments on
soldiers and segregation in American cities, Swelter
traces the lines that connect body heat to
global warming. In our
age of anthropogenic climate change, this work argues that the science of
climate and the science of the body can no longer be held apart—if they ever
could. Swelter will be published by Crown in the United States,
and Picador in the United Kingdom.
Dr. Venkat’s research on thermal inequality has been
funded by the Berggruen Foundation, the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard
Foundation Fellowship, the UC President’s Faculty Research Fellowship in the
Humanities, and a five-year National Science Foundation (NSF) Career Award,
which is the NSF’s most prestigious award in support of early-career faculty.
Dr.
Venkat is also the founding director of the UCLA Heat Lab, a diverse team of undergraduate and graduate students that
investigates thermal inequality from a variety of disciplinary perspectives,
ranging from biology and history to anthropology and urban planning. Students
in the lab have worked on an assortment of projects across Los Angeles, such as
eliciting oral histories about thermal experience in Watts and measuring the
occupational heat exposure of food truck workers in Westwood. In collaboration
with the UCLA TIE-INS Program, the Lab has also developed and taught climate
literacy curriculum for elementary and high school students in the LA Unified
School District (LAUSD). In recognition of his teaching and mentorship, Dr.
Venkat was awarded both the Excellence in Educational
Innovation Award (from the UCLA Life Sciences Division) and the Carole H. Browner
Student Mentorship Award (from the Society for Medical Anthropology).
Dr. Venkat and
his team have been interviewed about their research for a range of media
outlets, including CBS News, USA Today, NPR, the Associated Press, NBC, the
Guardian (UK), La Nación (Argentina), New Indian Express (India), Eater LA,
Spectrum News, Grist, and UCLA’s own Daily Bruin, amongst others.
Dr. Venkat has published extensively
in both academic journals and public-facing venues. His work on science and
medicine includes essays on ethical reasoning in the clinic,
the history of evidentiary paradigms in antibiotic research, the idea of radical cure, extreme
drug resistance in India, the history and possible future of
the sanatorium, iatrogenesis and zoonotic
disease, the idea of a TB-free
India, the near impossibility
of cure, and the graphic imagination of triage in the face of antibiotic failure.
His published work on heat includes
essays on anthropological
approaches to studying heat, how colonial-era knowledge
about climate was produced through racialized bodies, the relationship
between redlining and thermal inequality, the visualization of
race and heat in literature and film, the effects of heat on
food truck workers, and why thermal comfort
has been largely organized around the needs of men in suits.
Prior to arriving at UCLA, Dr. Venkat
held a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University’s Global Health Program
and was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the
University of Oregon. Due to the unexpected proximity of his office in Oregon
to the archives for Rajneeshpuram (an intentional community/“cult”), he has
also written a really fun essay on the relationship between immigration law, sham marriage,
and the study of cults.
You can find much of his work
collected here.