Arunabh Ghosh is a historian of modern China, with research and teaching interests in social and economic history, history of science and statecraft, environmental history, transnational history, and China-India history.
Ghosh’s first book, Making it Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the early People's Republic of China (Princeton University Press, 2020), investigates how the early PRC state built statistical capacity to know the nation through numbers. He has conducted research for the book in Beijing, Guangzhou, New Delhi, and Kolkata, and his work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Andrew F. Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, and Columbia University. His peer-reviewed work has appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies, Osiris, History and Technology, the International Journal of Asian Studies, BJHS Themes, EASTS, the Harvard Data Science Review, and the PRC History Review.
Ongoing research projects include a history of small hydropower in the PRC and a history of China-Indian networks of Science, ca. 1920-1980. He also co-leads (along with Tansen Sen and Gal Gvili) an NEH-funded collaborative project on the China-related materials within the Jawaharlal Nehru Papers, 1947-1964.
Ghosh's graduate offerings include seminars and pro-seminars on different aspects of twentieth century Chinese history, Asian environmental history, economics and history, and histories of infrastructure. He also offers examination fields in Modern Chinese History. At the undergraduate level, he regularly offers a survey lecture on Modern China (1894-Present) and has conference courses on large-scale technological and social engineering projects in post-imperial China and on the economic history of modern China.
Trained at Haverford College and at Tsinghua and Columbia universities, Ghosh joined the History Department in 2015 from the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, where he was an Academy Scholar for the 2014-15 AY.