Dr Amelia Bonea

Amelia Bonea is currently a Research Fellow at the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies, University of Heidelberg. She is a historian of modern South Asia and the British Empire, with degrees from the Universities of Tokyo (BLA and MA) and Heidelberg (PhD). Amelia works primarily at the intersections of media, science, technology and medicine. Her first book, The News of Empire: Telegraphy, Journalism, and the Politics of Reporting in Colonial India, c. 1830-1900, was published with Oxford University Press India in 2016 and received the 2017 Eugenia M. Palmegiano Prize for the best book on the history of journalism in any area of the world from the American Historical Association.

Her research for Diseases of Modern Life focused on occupational health in nineteenth-century Britain, the relationship between technologies of communication like the telegraph and telephone and medical practice, and print media and news values in colonial India. In collaboration with Pratham Books’ StoryWeaver, one of India’s biggest NGOs, she also produced an open-access children’s book about the history of telegraphy, which is now available in 8 languages.