Vikram Tamboli

Visiting Scholar
vtamboli@international.ucla.edu
Keywords: Brazil, Venezuela

Vikram Tamboli is a historian of Latin America and the Caribbean focusing on the plantation and hinterland spaces of Guyana, Venezuela, and Brazil. Thematically, his interests include questions of political radicalism, violence, race, rumor, spirituality, and medicine. He is currently working on completing his first book-length monograph on a 250-year history of trafficking in the Guyanese-Venezuelan borderlands. At the Latin American Institute, he collaborates with Professor Robin Derby to map the historical writings and existent secondary literature on plants and minerals, ethnobotanicals, and the social history of bioprospecting and ethnobotany in the Americas. He also lectures in UCLA's Department of History and is the creator and director of the Healing and Harming Garden Project, an experimental initiative to integrate the Plants and People(s) initiative at the M.E. Mathias Botanical Gardens, collections in the campus herbarium, and current teaching and research in the Departments of History, Geography, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UCLA.