Rijul Kochhar
Areas of Research: Transnational Histories of the Life Sciences and Infectious Diseases; Comparative Therapeutics; Environmental Anthropology; Critical Theories of Disability and Rationality.
Rijul Kochhar is a historian of science and an anthropologist. His research interests focus on transnational histories of the life sciences and infectious diseases; the rationality of therapeutic techniques; and critical studies of the environment and disability.
His first book, currently in progress, is titled Journeys of the Phage: Life in Post-Antibiotic Worlds. In it, he argues that we find ourselves, inexorably, at the dawn of a “post-antibiotic” era, a moment in human history where the promises of antibiotics are no longer guaranteed. In conceiving of the complex causes and consequences of antibiotic-resistant “superbugs” as bequests of the chemical age of antimicrobials (in domains ranging from healthcare to food production), his work examines the boundaries and connections of a planetary-scale crisis.
To grapple with this emerging post-antibiotic world, he explores the traveling history of bacteriophages as a therapeutic alternative to antibiotics across historically interconnected sites in ex-Soviet Georgia, India, and the United States. His book tells the story of how these “bacteria-devouring” viruses, once regarded as moribund, are historical actors. Gestating mutations not just in biological registers but also in cultural and epistemic ones, bacteriophages help illuminate the fundamental reconfiguration of individuals in modern collective life.
A second book project emerges from the first. Titled “Life, Edited: CRISPR and a History of the Future,” it pursues bacteriophages into the new millennium and examines their knowledge and technical role in the development of the gene-editing tool, CRISPR. Historically crafted on the adaptive immunity of bacteria infected by bacteriophage viruses, CRISPR inheres the possibility of redesigning an organism’s gene-pool. In doing so, this global technology of the life sciences raises pressing questions concerning kinship and the law; the intimacies of biology and identity; and the mutating configurations of disability and eugenics.
At Harvard, he teaches courses on comparative therapeutic traditions; the history of the modern life sciences and disability; and “planetary insecurities: drones, pathogens, climates.” Allied activities include convening a speaker series, “Bios: The Sciences of Life,” which aims at connecting the department to the most exciting social and bench research related to biology, capaciously defined.
He earned a PhD at MIT, and held a postdoctoral fellowship in the Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His cat’s name is Pi, aka 22/7.