Northeastern professor will explore colonialism in the afterlife as part of Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellow Kris Manjapra, a Northeastern historian, is writing a book on the afterlives of people who die under colonialism.
At what point does colonialism’s impact end for a person living and dying under its rule?
Perhaps not even after death, said Kris Manjapra, an interdisciplinary historian and professor of history and global studies at Northeastern University.
Manjapra explores this question in his next book, “Necroempire,” which examines the “afterlives of people who die under colonialism,” from those targeted in the Jim Crow South of the United States to Indigenous people of South Asia.
“The global story of the different long afterlives that colonized peoples live, for example, in museums, in medical schools, in prisons. There are different institutions that come to light, and I’m telling that tale,” Manjapra said.
While death is one part of this book, Manjapra noted, it is also about survival and descendants, and community and ancestor activism, or how descendants “give peace to those who have departed.”
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Manjapra was recently named a 2026-2027 Guggenheim Fellow for Intellectual and Cultural History, and will work to complete this book on a fellowship over the next year.
“I feel so honored for that endorsement,” he said, noting that he has admired many past Guggenheim Fellowship recipients. “It feels nice to join that family, so to speak.”
This fellowship, he said, offers “that recognition or acknowledgement of having made a generative contribution that hopefully others can find useful and use as a springboard for their own work. That makes me very happy.”
Nearly 5,000 people applied to the 101st fellow class of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Manjapra, the Stearns Trustee Professor of History and Global Studies at Northeastern, is among 223 people across 55 fields to receive the honor. Fellows receive a stipend to pursue work in “the freest conditions possible,” according to a news release.
“It is super competitive,” said Otonye Braide-Moncoeur, Provost Fellow for Faculty Awards and Recognition at Northeastern. “A lot of people who do receive this end up being Nobel laureates or get Pulitzer Prizes.”
She added: “This is part of our mission. It has (multiple) facets as to why it’s beneficial for the institution, but also for him as an individual.”
Manjapra’s work spans the bridge between global history and the critical study of race and colonialism, also linking Black studies with South Asian studies. His work is not just about the past, but also spans to the present and future with community engagement. Manjapra co-founded Black History in Action, which is working to protect St. Augustine’s African Orthodox Church from gentrification and ensure the building “stays connected to a legacy, the legacy of Black families” who created this space, he said.
“I’ve always been interested in the continuations, the legacies, the afterlives, the hauntings of imperial systems and colonial violence,” Manjapra said. “So, that theme connects a lot of my work over the years.”
Manjapra added that colonial violence is related, no matter the geography.
Colonial contexts, he said, are “very interwoven and we can’t understand them on a flat map. That’s why we have to study, for example, the Jim Crow South (in the United States) side by side with the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal because they’re actually historically interconnected.”
In this book, Manjapra in part looks into how Indigenous Andamanese people were “such a focus for the colonial gaze” in the 19th century, and how today communities are seeking repatriation of their ancestors.
“At the very time when (Indigenous) Andamanese people were being targeted for museum collections and for medical schools, here in the United States, Black communities were also being targeted during the Jim Crow period,” Manjapra said, referring to the period in the U.S. during which racial segregation laws were in effect and “various still unacknowledged pipelines channeled the dead bodies of Black people into medical schools and museums.”
Manjapra began working on his latest book around 2018 or 2019. He recalled a moment around this time that, while conducting research for his book “Colonialism in Global Perspective” at a library in Berlin, he came across in the archives lockets of hair from colonized people of Papua New Guinea. Germany had colonized a portion of the island for 30 years starting in the late 1800s.
“There’s something about that physical encounter with the embodiment of people whom I’ll never know, but who I can imagine were caught up in a whole system of exploitation that made it feel very important to keep pulling on a thread,” he said.
“That’s one of the fascinating things I find about the work of the historian is not what you’re looking for, but what taps you on the shoulder and asks you to pay attention and take a second look.”
Manjapra’s other titles include “Black Ghost of Empire: The Long Death of Slavery and the Failure of Emancipation,” “Colonialism in Global Perspective” and “Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals across Empire.”
Hannah Morse is a news reporter at Northeastern Global News.
