Ayesha Mukherjee is Senior Lecturer in Renaissance Literature and Culture at the University of Exeter. Her first book Penury into Plenty: Dearth and the Making of Knowledge in Early Modern England (London and New York: Routledge, 2014) argued, with special attention to the rarely studied manuscripts and published works of the Elizabethan scientist, medical practitioner, socio-economic analyst, trader and poet Sir Hugh Platt (1552-1608), that dearth in this period gave crucial stimulus to knowledge-making and the formation of an experimental program of resource management, which Mukherjee terms “dearth science”. She is currently Principal Investigator for the AHRC-funded project (2014-16), titled “Famine and Dearth in India and Britain, 1550-1800: Connected Cultural Histories of Food Security”, which will be the basis of her next book, a comparative study of the cultural histories of famine and dearth in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century India and Britain.