December 2023: Dr. Benjamin Siegel (CAS History)
Benjamin Siegel is a historian of modern economic life and politics, agriculture, and the environment, with a geographic focus on South Asia and its entanglements with the wider world. Dr. Siegel received his B.A. from Yale University and his A.M. and Ph.D. from Harvard University; his dissertation won the 2014 Sardar Patel Award given by the Center for India and South Asia at UCLA, honoring “the best doctoral dissertation on any aspect of modern India.” Professor Siegel is currently working on three interlinked future projects: a short history of tangible and intangible resources in modern India, a global history of South Asian development, and a project on traffic, roads, and automobiles in the region. Professor Siegel’s work has been published in the American Historical Review, the Caravan, the Christian Science Monitor, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Contemporary South Asia, Environmental History, Humanity, the Indian Economic Social and History Review, the International History Review, Modern Asian Studies, the World Policy Journal, VICE, and other journals and edited volumes. His work has been sponsored by grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Smithsonian Institution’s Lemelson Center, and the Boston University Center for the Humanities. Learn more about Professor Siegel in his full interview below.
What made you decide to be a social scientist/ why does social science matter to you?
My initial training was as a journalist, and I loved writing and editing stories from my two postings in New Delhi and Hong Kong, but yearned for analytical frameworks that could help me understand what I was reporting on, and the ability to ask slightly more complicated questions than short-form or long-form journalism allowed me to ask. I went back to my undergraduate work in history, and found that history and historiography was a vehicle that helped me approach big questions about how states, citizens, markets, and ecologies all interact.
Can you tell us about a recent research project that you’re excited about?
I just finished my second book, which is a transnational history of the world’s licit pharmaceutical opioid production. I started with a big question – was there a different way to think historically about the United States opioid crisis? – and ended up tracing the story archivally through sources in India, Turkey, Australia, Mexico, and the United States. I’m excited to get this work out and to start getting people’s reactions to it!
What is the best piece of professional advice you ever received?
A mentor once told me to avoid thinking about the output of your work in discrete terms – a monograph, an article, a conference paper, an op-ed – and to instead frame that work as a big project with many different interacting parts. I’ve found that this helps me think about different ways to present and approach my work, and to never feel too stuck in one particular mode of communication.
What is your favorite course you’ve taught at BU?
Impossible for me to pick a favorite. I love teaching my history of South Asia course – it’s a big ride from the beginning of human civilization to the contemporary politics of the region – but also love the scale and scope of teaching my big lectures on the global history of food, and the global history of medicine.
Tell us a surprising fact about yourself.
I’ve been an extra in a few movies filmed in South Asia. You can see my very-not-academic output in the Reluctant Fundamentalist and Zero Dark Thirty.