Professor Suman Seth works on the social, cultural, and intellectual history of science and medicine. His interests include the history of medicine, race, and colonialism, the physical sciences (particularly quantum theory), & gender and science. He is the author of Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and Crafting the Quantum: Arnold Sommerfeld and the Practice of Theory, 1890-1926 (MIT, 2010). He has served as the guest editor of a special issue of the journal Postcolonial Studies on “Science, Colonialism, Postcolonialism” (December, 2009) and of a ‘Focus’ Section of the Journal Isis on ‘Re-Locating Race.’ He is coeditor (with Prof. Patrick McCray) of the Journal Osiris.

Professor Seth’s current research looks at the history of medicine, race, and colonialism in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British Empire, with particular emphasis on the history of ‘seasoning,’ or, as it came to be known in the nineteenth century, ‘acclimation’ or ‘acclimatization.’