About

Suman Seth is the Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow and Marie Underhill Noll Professor of the History of Science at Cornell University. His work focuses on the social, cultural, and intellectual history of science and medicine, with particular interests in the history of medicine, race, colonialism, the physical sciences (notably quantum theory), and gender and science. He has authored the book 'Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire' and 'Crafting the Quantum: Arnold Sommerfeld and the Practice of Theory, 1890-1926'. Seth has served as a guest editor for special issues of the journal Postcolonial Studies and Isis, and is a coeditor of the journal Osiris. His current research examines the history of medicine, race, and colonialism in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British Empire, with a particular focus on the history of 'seasoning,' or 'acclimation,' in the context of colonial practices.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Political Science
• World Wide Web
• Mathematics
• Epistemology
• Anthropology
• Demography
• Philosophy
• Statistics
• Law

Selected publications

• A Roundtable Discussion on Collecting Demographics Data

  Isis · 2020 · 10 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Computer Science
  • Sociology

  Identifying this natal link between statistical identities and distanced control does not of course mean that we should reject statistically “enumerated identities” tout court in favor of some more “fuzzy identities.”62 To do so would be to lapse into an ahistorical fantasy of return. This is where our third key theme, difference, comes into play—difference not merely in the sense of something that is disciplined and contained but, rather, as an ethical project. As Burton points out, whatever value the demographic project may or may not have, we have to think of alternatives that will tackle the “leaky pipeline” by which difference is leached off and diversity carefully curated in ways that sustain and reproduce existing patterns of privilege and consensus. Counting diversity, in other words, has to be wedded to a commitment to making our journal, our Society, and our field different.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Sabina Alkire

  80 shared

• María Emma Santos

  49 shared

• José Manuel Roche

  44 shared

• Paola Ballón

  37 shared

• James E. Foster

  34 shared

• Gastón Yalonetzky

  University of Leeds

  17 shared

• Sugata Bag

  13 shared

• Mark McGillivray

  10 shared

Education

• PhD, Department of Economics

  Vanderbilt University

  2010

Awards & honors

• Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow
• Marie Underhill Noll Professor of the History of Science

Similar researchers at Cornell University

• Edward Bucklerh-182
• Robert Sternbergh-168
• John P. Mooreh-153
• Olivier Elementoh-150
• Andy Clarkh-142