Pyar Seth

Pyar Seth is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Notre Dame. A scholar of medicine, science, and the Black Atlantic, their research examines how modern states manage Black life and death. Working across historical and medical anthropology, postcolonial studies, and queer theory, Pyar traces how violence gets rationalized, how suffering gets measured, and how difference gets conscripted into everyday technologies of governance. Pyar also directs HipHopRx, a studio-lab that engages sound, performance, and multimedia to explore the same questions in a different key.

 

Pyar is the author of Scripted Death: How Medicine Justifies State Violence (NYU Press, 2027), an intellectual and cultural history of medical explanations that have repeatedly transformed questions of political responsibility into questions of individual pathology. Their second book, Markets for Souls: Necrofinance, Slavery, and the City of London, co-authored with Alexandre White, extends the conceptual work of their digital humanities exhibition Underwriting Souls, examining how insurance, underwriting, and credit systematized the political economy of the Atlantic slave trade. Currently, Pyar is also working on a third book, The Making of the Hip Hop Brain, which traces how race and sound became constitutive objects of study in neuroscience research. Some of their current and forthcoming scholarship can be found in Punishment & Society, Transforming Anthropology, Qualitative Inquiry, Southern Cultures, Cultural Studies↔Critical Methodologies, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Multimodality & Society, among others.

 

Before joining the department, Pyar was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values, a Visiting Research Scholar in the History of Medicine at King's College London, and a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Research Scholar. Pyar holds a PhD in Anthropology and Political Science from Johns Hopkins University, with MAs in each field, and concurrent interdisciplinary training as a Graduate Fellow at the Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine.