Secrets to Patents is excited to welcome our new postdoc, Angana Moitra, who will start her position at the Centre for Privacy Studies (University of Copenhagen). Angana will investigate how colonialist strategies of appropriating indigenous medicinal and pharmacological knowledge and reframing them as scientific discourse unfolded under British colonial rule in the Indian subcontinent. You can read more about Angana’s research and position here.
Trans-Imperial Strategies for Keeping Medicines as Private Assets from 1500 to 1900
Secrets to Patents
The Project
The Research Environment Secrets to Patents investigates the long-term history of how life-saving and health-improving medicines became for-profit commodities from 1500 to 1900. Focusing on the Atlantic Colonial Nexus, the project’s team will investigate the strategies that different historical agents used to claim ownership of medicinal knowledge.
Funding
Secrets to Patents has been generously funded by the Swedish Research Council (2025-2030) and hosted at Lund University (SE), in collaboration with the Centre for Privacy Studies at the University of Copenhagen (DK) and the History Department of Universidade Federal de Santa Maria (BR).
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