Sujit Thomas

Sujit Thomas is an anthropologist of science, technology and medicine with expertise in Europe, North America and India. His work examines the history and anthropology of the mind, cultures of the self, and the “psy-sciences” (psychiatry, psychoanalysis, psychology, neuroscience). Other research and teaching interests include: pharmaceuticals, brains, prosthetics; mysticism, shamanism and altered states of consciousness; semiotics, more-than-human intelligences and the futures of AI.

Sujit’s current book project, The Open Mind: Repair and Enhancement in the Age of Plasticity investigates how a transnational community of neuroscientists, psychiatrists, investors, substance users and patients is using psychedelic drugs and cybernetic brain devices to redress a material and epistemic crisis in global psychiatry, responding to the long-term failure of neuroscience to deliver novel explanations for human consciousness and interventions for mental disorders. Drawing on 24 months of fieldwork in labs, clinics and underground communities in London and New York City, The Open Brain shows how the neuroscientific imaginary of “plasticity” is engaging substance-users, physicians, investors and psychiatric survivors, redefining biomedical conceptions of mental illness, driving pharmaceutical innovation, and turning the brain into an organ of ceaseless self-transformation, ever available for scientific, medical and financial capture. This research was funded by grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the Social Science Research Council. It has appeared or is forthcoming in BioSocieties and the American Journal of Psychiatry. Sujit is Co-Editor of a Special Issue of BioSocieties entitled “A Paradigm Shift in Psychiatry?”, due to appear in December 2026, and leads the Thanatology Project at the Psychedelic Humanities Lab at the New School for Social Research.

Sujit earned his PhD from the Department of Anthropology at New York University, where he also taught in the Department of Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement. In a previous life, he read Modern British and European History as a Rhodes Scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford.