Arunabh Ghosh is a social, economic, and intellectual historian of modern China, with interests in transnational histories of science and statecraft and Sino-Indian history. Ghosh’s first book, Making it Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the early People's Republic of China (Princeton University Press, 2020), investigates how the early PRC state built statistical capacity to know the nation through numbers.

He has conducted research for this project in Beijing, Guangzhou, New Delhi, and Kolkata, and his work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Andrew F. Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, and Columbia University. Ghosh is additionally interested in applying digital methods, in particular text mining and bibliometric analysis, to the study of the early People’s Republic. Currently, he is pivoting toward a history of dam construction--especially the large number of smaller dams at the local level--in twentieth century China and a series of essays on 1950s China-India history.