Pyar Seth is a PhD Candidate at the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute pursuing a dual degree in Anthropology and Political Science. He is also a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Research Scholar and a Graduate Fellow to the Black Beyond Data Project. Broadly, Pyar studies the history of Black Atlantic Thought, policing and medicalization, and the epistemic organization of health, disease, and risk. Capping off his research interests are questions related to Hip Hop and the medical humanities, thinking through the ways that subjectivity and modernity are both constituted by sound. That is, the spectral figurations of aural perception that define how subjects enter and encounter archives. At the core of intellectual agenda, one could also say that a foundational question is the following: Given the pervasiveness of anti-Black violence, for Black people, what does it mean to rest?

His dissertation is entitled, The Spectral Defect: Rethinking the War on Drugs Through Medicine; it is an intellectual history of medical diagnoses that have been used to ‘explain away’ concerns about racialized fatalities that occur in state custody, dating from roughly the 1960s to the present. Additionally, some of his work can be found in Cultural Studies ~ Critical Methodologies, Religions, the Journal of Hip Hop Studies, to name a few.