Anil Paralkar

Anil Paralkar is a PhD candidate at the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies (HCTS) at Heidelberg University. He received his MA in history from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, and completed the Graduate Programme for Transcultural Studies at Heidelberg University. He has been a visiting fellow at the German Historical Institute London (2014), the Special Collections of the University of Amsterdam (Prof. J. M. van Winter Stipend, 2016), Yale University (2018), the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (2018), and a guest lecturer at the University of Chicago (2018). In 2018, his research was awarded the best article prize by the International Society for Cultural History (ISCH)—an article which was subsequently published in 2020 in Cultural History. His PhD project investigates changes in the European knowledge on Indian foods at the overlap of medicine, health, and ethnography during the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. It shows that new empirical and observational strategies altered forms of ethnographic othering, which led to a “scientific” racialization of foodways and agricultural habits in the eighteenth century. At the MPIWG, he is studying the entanglement of multiple literary genres, like botanical and medical treatises, ethnographic literature, and correspondences on Indian food and agriculture, to understand their characters as hybrid epistemic genres. He is part of the working group “Agriculture and the Making of Sciences (1100–1700).”