Dr. Thiyagaraj Gurunathan is the Jamnalal Kaniram Bajaj Fellow, Fall 2026. During his fellowship, he is working with Prof. David Jones, A. Bernard Ackerman Professor of the Culture of Medicine and the Chair, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University.
Dr. Gurunathan is an early-career researcher working at the intersection of health humanities and cultural studies. His research focuses primarily on unpacking the cultural meanings of contagion in South Asia, particularly in the Indian context.
He received his PhD from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Roorkee in 2025. His doctoral thesis, titled “Reading Indian Immunities: Socio-cultural Responses in Indian Outbreak Narratives”, conducts literary historiography of contagious disease outbreaks in colonial and early post-colonial India. His range of publications on the topic covers journal articles, book chapters, book reviews and even encyclopedia entries.
At Harvard, Dr. Gurunathan aims to integrate his disciplinary strengths in literature and cultural studies, moving towards the history of medicine, with a critical focus on histories of caste and contagion in India.
