Johan Ehrstedt is a PhD candidate at Åbo Akademi University, Finland.
His research interests include historical famine studies and famine research in its different forms, modern South Asian history, history of ideas, history of development thought and gender history.
Currently Johan is working on his dissertation which has the working title ”In the shadow of past and future famines: The politics of hunger and famine in East Pakistan/Bangladesh, 1947–2010”. Within the framework of his research he conjoins aspects of the above-mentioned approaches and aims to explore the many ways in which the interrelated phenomena of hunger and famine have been conceptualized and (mis)used in the spheres of politics and development in post-colonial East Pakistan, later Bangladesh. His research is based on the notion that hunger and famine can be viewed as expressions of asymmetrical power relations and, by extension, they are always political in character, too.