Prakash Kumar is Associate Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University. He is a specialist of South Asian history with interest in science and technology, colonial history, development, and agrarian and rural modernization. His first book, Indigo Plantations and Science in Colonial India (Cambridge University Press, 2012), complicates the history of colonial “improvement” by examining global knowledge flows and colonial science on the indigo plantations established by European planters in colonial India. It examines the claims of the planters that “natural” indigo made on plantations was superior to the cheaper and purer synthetic indigo launched on the international markets in 1899. He is currently working on his second monograph project that examines American projects of agrarian and rural modernization in India in the second half of the twentieth century. This book illustrates the contested territory of modernization in India by examining American archives of intervention and the playing out of tensions in execution of community development programs, pursuit of extractive agricultural practices, in food aid and public distribution systems, an epistemic community in which ideas of yield enhancement struck roots, and in rural-urban continuums. He has published widely in history journals including Journal of Asian Studies, Modern Asian Studies, Indian Economic and Social History Review, Technology and Culture, Agricultural History, South Asia, and Comparative Studies in Society and History. His research has been supported twice by Scholar Awards by the National Science Foundation. In 2020-21, he will be the United States Fulbright Scholar in India.