About

Bharat J Venkat is a faculty member at the University of California, Los Angeles, affiliated with both the Anthropology and History departments as well as the Institute for Genetics & Society. He holds academic credentials from Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied anthropology, and has also completed postdoctoral work at Princeton University in the Center for Health and Wellbeing. His research focuses on the anthropological history and social dimensions of disease and cure, particularly tuberculosis in India. Venkat's work critically examines the concept of cure, exploring its meanings beyond the simple ending of illness and treatment. Through his book "At the Limits of Cure" (Duke University Press, 2021), he investigates the history of tuberculosis treatment in India from the colonial period to the present, highlighting the challenges posed by antibiotic resistance and the shifting understandings of what it means to be cured. His scholarship addresses the intersections of medicine, environment, race, and ethics, as seen in his studies of sanatoria, veterinary medicine, and the embodied experience of climate in colonial India. Venkat's contributions include a nuanced critique of curative reason and an exploration of ethical reasoning in medical and familial contexts, emphasizing the complexities and limits of cure in contemporary and historical settings.

Research topics

• History
• Sociology
• Psychology
• Criminology
• Ecology
• Medicine
• Philosophy
• Gender studies
• Environmental health
• Biology
• Aesthetics
• Cognitive psychology
• Art
• Epistemology
• Veterinary medicine
• Environmental ethics

Selected publications

• Carceral heat exposure as harmful design: An integrative model for understanding the health impacts of heat on incarcerated people in the United States

  Social Science & Medicine · 2025-01-08 · 7 citations

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  In an era of climate change-driven weather events, extreme heat has become the most lethal form of "natural disaster" in the United States. However, its negative consequences are unequally distributed. Incarceration exacerbates vulnerability to heat-related illnesses and deaths. This article reviews and synthesizes a range of literature related to carceral heat exposure to characterize the complex biological, social, infrastructural, financial, and legal mechanisms through which incarcerated people experience heat-related illnesses and deaths. These mechanisms include the location, design, and construction of carceral facilities; structural racism and poverty that lead to the overrepresentation of specific populations within the carceral system; comorbid conditions amongst incarcerated people; the use of medication as a form of control; barriers to medical care; institutional neglect; and the weaponization of heat as a tactic of retaliation. This article also reviews the patchwork regulatory apparatus related to carceral heat exposure, legal efforts to improve protections for incarcerated people, and obstacles to implementing those protections. In reviewing the literature, we find that there is no singular factor that explains how and why incarcerated people are especially vulnerable to the deleterious effects of heat. We offer instead an integrative model for understanding how multiple mechanisms are consolidated by the carceral system, magnifying the vulnerability of incarcerated people to the effects of heat. As social scientists have demonstrated in other contexts, no one dies from a heat wave alone; instead, they experience illness and death as a result of social and infrastructural arrangements that render them vulnerable to the effects of heat. Our aim is to elucidate the specific arrangements through which the carceral system makes people vulnerable to heat. We argue that exposure to debilitating heat and its attendant consequences represent more than a failure of the carceral system - rather, they reveal its fundamentally harmful design.

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• Reservoirs: thinking history in the present

  History and Technology · 2024-10-01

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• Reservoirs of history

  History and Technology · 2024-10-01 · 1 citations

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• Through a glass darkly: race, thermal sensation and the nervous body in late colonial India

  BJHS Themes · 2022 · 10 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Aesthetics
  • History

  Abstract This article explores the role of what might be termed embodied experience in generating knowledge about climate – specifically by focusing on conversations about the effects of climate on the body in late nineteenth-century India. Central to the story is the question of how race maps onto ideas about the body's capacity to register or perceive its environment, and how this question articulates with concerns about standardization and judgement in scientific practice. Focusing on tropical heat, I argue that the British body became figured in late colonial scientific discourse as a kind of sensing technology, one that was transformed by the heat that it registered. However, determining the effects of heat on the body was not always straightforward; the sensation of heat was, at moments, attributed not to heat but instead to light. At stake in this partial displacement from heat to light was not the sensation itself, nor the bodily effects it produced, but rather the mechanisms that produced these sensations and effects. Nevertheless, observing these racialized bodily effects was a way to know climate, arguably as important as recording data from thermometers. Along these lines, pigmentation became a powerful, if imperfect, marker of racial difference that was also thought to confer specific sensory capacities on some and not on others. And it was through these capacities, through the perceived ability of certain bodies (and not others) to register the effects of heat and light, that knowledge of climate became intimately tied to ideas about race and biology.

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• Iatrogenic life: veterinary medicine, cruelty, and the politics of culling in India

  Anthropology and Medicine · 2021 · 23 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Veterinary medicine
  • Criminology
  • Environmental ethics

  Drawing on fieldwork with the veterinary staff at an Indian wildlife sanctuary, this paper examines the controversy surrounding an epizootic outbreak of tuberculosis among a population of sloth bears. As these bears fell ill and began to die, the veterinary staff asked whether they might be culled, inciting allegations of incompetence and cruelty from both the media and government bureaucrats. This paper works through a series of ethico-legal questions regarding the cullability of these tuberculous bears, which depended in part on how the bears were classified - as wild or domestic, captive or free, curable or incurable. As boundary-crossing figures, the bears confounded straightforward efforts at classification, rendering their fates open to debate. In treating them, the veterinary staff feared that they were only extending their suffering, producing a form of life that might be thought of as iatrogenic. In this light, this paper suggests that cruelty - both the cruelty of culling and that of treatment - might be figured as an unavoidable aspect of the relation of dependency between animals and their human caretakers.

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• At the Limits of Cure

  2021-08-23 · 3 citations

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  Can a history of cure be more than a history of how disease comes to an end? In 1950s Madras, an international team of researchers demonstrated that antibiotics were effective in treating tuberculosis. But just half a century later, reports out of Mumbai stoked fears about the spread of totally drug-resistant strains of the disease. Had the curable become incurable? Through an anthropological history of tuberculosis treatment in India, Bharat Jayram Venkat examines what it means to be cured, and what it means for a cure to come undone. At the Limits of Cure tells a story that stretches from the colonial period—a time of sanatoria, travel cures, and gold therapy—into a postcolonial present marked by antibiotic miracles and their failures. Venkat juxtaposes the unraveling of cure across a variety of sites: in idyllic hill stations and crowded prisons, aboard ships and on the battlefield, and through research trials and clinical encounters. If cure is frequently taken as an ending (of illness, treatment, and suffering more generally), Venkat provides a foundation for imagining cure otherwise in a world of fading antibiotic efficacy.

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• A Vital Mediation: The Sanatorium, before and after Antibiotics

  Technology and Culture · 2019-01-01 · 16 citations

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  As drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis spread across India, commentators have warned that we are returning to the sanatorium era. Such concerns might be symptomatically read in terms of loss; however, prophecies of return might also signal that there is something to be regained. Rather than lamenting the end of the antibiotic era, I shift the focus to ask about the sanatorium, not simply as a technology of the past, but as a technology of an imminent future. In examining late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century conversations about treating tuberculosis in India, I demonstrate how the the sanatorium was figured as a therapeutic technology that mediated the relationship between the body and its colonial milieu. In this light, I argue that contemporary prophecies of a future past register not simply the loss of antibiotic efficacy, but also a desire to return to a therapeutics that foregrounds issues of vitality, mediation, and environment.

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• Of Cures and Curses: Toward a Critique of Curative Reason

  Public Culture · 2018-04-13 · 17 citations

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  Research Article| May 01 2018 Of Cures and Curses: Toward a Critique of Curative Reason Bharat Jayram Venkat Bharat Jayram Venkat Bharat Jayram Venkat is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oregon. His recent publications include “Scenes of Commitment” (Cultural Anthropology, February 2017) and “Cures” (Public Culture, September 2016). He is currently completing a book titled “India after Antibiotics: Tuberculosis at the Limits of Cure.” Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (2018) 30 (2): 277–282. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-4310918 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Email Permissions Search Site Citation Bharat Jayram Venkat; Of Cures and Curses: Toward a Critique of Curative Reason. Public Culture 1 May 2018; 30 (2): 277–282. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-4310918 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsPublic Culture Search Advanced Search In an earlier essay that appeared in Public Culture, Bharat Jayram Venkat asked what it might mean to think of cure as an ending lacking finality. Here, in response to Paul H. Mason et al., he briefly expands on his thoughts from that essay. Drawing on his research on tuberculosis in India, he identifies the consequences of a widely shared investment in cure’s finality—what he calls, after Mircea Eliade, a vision of “radical cure.” Such an investment threatens to foreclose our recognition of the limits of cure, as well as curtail our willingness to conceive of other possibilities of cure, ones in which we are left without tidy endings. The task, then, of a critique of curative reason is to clarify these limits, precisely so that we are able to imagine cure otherwise. antibiotics, bacteriology, cure, India, tuberculosis Copyright 2018 Duke University Press2018 Issue Section: “Cures”: An Exchange You do not currently have access to this content.

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• Chasing the Cure in New Mexico: Tuberculosis and the Quest for Health. Nancy Owen Lewis, Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 2016, 315 pp.

  Medical Anthropology Quarterly · 2017-05-25

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• Scenes of Commitment

  Cultural Anthropology · 2017-02-23 · 24 citations

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  What shape does ethical reasoning assume in the face of potentially contradictory commitments? Drawing on fieldwork in a private clinic in Chennai, the capital of the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, I examine how patients, their families, and the clinic’s staff navigated ethically complex situations in which one was called on as both family member and patient. I argue that the doctors and counselors at the clinic attempted to reconfigure the relationship between what were experienced as divergent or contradictory commitments—to treatment and to close kin—in terms of what I call hierarchical subsumption. This mode of response worked not simply to recast treatment as noncontradictory with familial obligations; rather, the commitment to therapy became hierarchically subsumed by and therefore necessary to the fulfillment of such kin-based commitments. In attending to those ordinary moments in which commitments are felt to be at odds, I suggest that we might develop a better understanding of the particular styles of ethical reasoning that people employ to manage such conflictual situations, which refuse the kind of tacitness that scholars have associated with everyday life.

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Awards & honors

• RAI Wellcome Medal (from the Royal Anthropological Institute…
• Edie Turner Book Prize for Ethnographic Writing (from the So…
• Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences (from th…
• Berggruen Foundation Fellowship
• George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship