Karuna Vikram
Research Interests: History of capitalism; history of technology; science policy; economic and social history; science and health policy; political economy; critical legal studies; business history; neoliberalism; international history; 20th Century U.S. history; modern South Asia.
Karuna studies the historical relationship between science and capitalism, law and society, and how they have shaped our world today. Specifically, her research has focused on the political economy of intellectual property rights and how the idea of ‘innovation’ has been policed and regulated in the history of the 1995 TRIPS Agreement. In her graduate research, Karuna will examine the dawn of the computing age in the United States, its global politics, and the ties between the rhetoric of technological innovation and philanthropic capitalism.
Karuna’s research so far has spanned India and the U.S. in the 20th century.
Notable past projects have been on India’s 1970 Patents Act, the free and open-source software revolution, and the influence of multinational corporations on international politics as seen through the Intellectual Property Committee, which have led her to work in state and private archives in Switzerland, the United Kingdom, India, and the United States. Karuna is committed to bringing the Global South into conversations about capital, free markets, and power in the histories of medicine and technology.
Previous Degrees:
B.A., History, Columbia University
M.Phil., Economic and Social History, University of Cambridge