Eric Moses Gurevitch

Eric Moses Gurevitch is an assistant professor of the history of technology in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. 

Gurevitch’s research explores the histories of science, technology, and medicine in the medieval and early modern periods, with a focus on South Asia and the Indian Ocean. It narrates a global history in which unexpected voices, practices, and events come to stand alongside standard narratives. 

Gurevitch’s first monograph, under contract with the University of Chicago Press, is titled Everyday Sciences: Practical Knowledge and Knowledgeable Practice in South Asia. The book documents the rise of vernacular sciences in precolonial South Asia and explores how people turned to writing to describe practices such as predicting the weather, assaying gold, and healing poisons. It will be published simultaneously in South Asia through Permanent Black Press.

His second monograph-length project explores the literate and numerate practices of artisans and other people from caste-oppressed communities. The project brings together questions of craft, technology, and caste to tell an intellectual history that extends beyond the history of intellectuals.

At Harvard, Gurevitch teaches courses in the cultural history of technology and the global history of science. He sponsors the Early Sciences Working Group, a forum that brings together scholars from across disciplines working on the premodern period.

Gurevitch received a PhD from the University of Chicago conferred jointly by the Department of South Asian Languages & Civilizations and the Committee on the Conceptual & Historical Studies of Science. His dissertation was awarded the DK Award for the Outstanding Doctoral Thesis on Sanskrit from the International Association of Sanskrit Studies; the Dissertation Prize from the Division of History of Science and Technology of the International Congress of History of Science and Technology; the Dissertation Award on the Formation of Knowledge from the University of Chicago; and the Mohini Jain Presidential Chair in Jain Studies Best Dissertation Award from the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Davis. Subsequently, he was a National Endowment for the Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at Vanderbilt University, where he was selected as Vanderbilt's Postdoctoral Fellow of the Year.