Minakshi Menon

Minakshi Menon studied medieval Indian history at Jawaharlal Nehru University and the University of Delhi, and then took her PhD in History of Science and Science Studies at the University of California San Diego. She has held two postdoctoral fellowships, the first in Department II (Lorraine Daston) of the MPIWG and the second at the Berlin Center for the History of Knowledge and Humboldt University. She is currently engaged in completing a book manuscript titled “Empiricism’s Empire: Natural-Knowledge Making, State-Making and Governance in East India Company India, 1784–1830.” She is also the editor of a special issue of South Asian History and Culture on “Indigenous Knowledges and Colonial Sciences in South Asia,” which will appear in 2020. She co-chairs the Forum for the History of Science in Asia, a special interest group of the History of Science Society.

Minakshi’s research project, “Hortus Indicus Malabaricus: the Eurasian Life of a Seventeenth-Century 'European' Botanical Classic,” studies the plant descriptions and illustrations in the 12-volume Hortus Malabaricus (published 1678-1693), in order to understand the natural knowledge-making practices of Dutch colonists, Brahman and Ezhava physicians, and other groups, in the Malayalam-speaking parts of southwest India.

Multimedia

• “Decolonizing Herbarium Collections.” Gardens of Empire. On the politics of collecting nature. Part of series 99 Questions: Colonialism and Coloniality, Humboldt Forum, Berlin, 21/02/2022:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mm0A9uZ8zQ&t=1370s (English)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lemV2R1GZ0k&t=1230s  (With simultaneous German translation)