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Dwaipayan Banerjee to speak on India computing history at Yale
Banerjee, an associate professor at MIT, focuses on the intellectual labor of thinkers and practitioners from the Global South.
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Pranavi Sharma - Mon, 20, Apr 2026
- 03:28 EDT
- 18
Dwaipayan Banerjee and poster of the event. / MIT, Yale
Indian-origin scholar Dwaipayan Banerjee will be speaking at Yale's South Asian Studies Council on April 21, presenting a talk titled ‘Computing in the Age of Decolonization: India’s Lost Technological Revolution.’
The event is part of the Spring 2026 Colloquium Series and will take place from 12 to 1:30 p.m. at Henry R. Luce Hall, Room 203. It is organized by the Yale MacMillan Center’s South Asian Studies Council.
Banerjee, an associate professor of science, technology, and society at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), focuses on the intellectual labor of thinkers and practitioners from the Global South. His work examines how histories of science, technology and medicine are shaped, with a particular emphasis on South Asia.
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His research spans health and medicine, pandemics, biological materials and computing. He is the author of “Enduring Cancer: Life, Death, and Diagnosis in Delhi” (Duke University Press, 2020) and co-author of “Hematologies: The Political Life of Blood in India.”
The April 21 talk draws from his current book project, “Computing in the Time of Decolonization,” which studies the development of computing in India in the years following independence. The project examines how computing was tied to early postcolonial ambitions of technological self-reliance and scientific sovereignty.
It also looks at the challenges faced by Indian technocrats in building a domestic computing industry and the reasons those efforts were not sustained. The research addresses broader global hierarchies that continue to shape the field of computing.
Banerjee’s recent work has also engaged with the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on vaccine politics, the historiography of pandemics and ethical questions surrounding end-of-life care in India.
His academic honors include the MIT SHASS Research Funds Award in 2022, the James A. and Ruth Levitan Prize in the Humanities in 2018, and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Social Science Research Council.
The lecture is scheduled as part of a weekly Tuesday series hosted during the Spring 2026 term.
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