TAMARA FERNANDO
Assistant Professor (PhD University of Cambridge 2022)
Office: S-341
Email: tamara.fernando@stonybrook.edu
Interests: Indian Ocean world, Persian/Arabian Gulf, Sri Lanka, histories of science, environment, and labour
My research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of histories of labour, environment, and science, with a particular focus on the nineteenth and twentieth-century Indian Ocean world. My current book project Shallow Blue Empire: Knowing the Littoral across the Indian Ocean strives for a “history below the water line,” through a trans-national account of the pearling industry across the northern Indian Ocean. Focused on the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Mannar, and the Mergui/Myeik archipelago. The book outlines how modes of knowledge about the littoral zone of the ocean were determined in the context of the British Empire at the turn of the twentieth century. I am invested in trans-regional and interdisciplinary methods to the study of the past, as well as the question of how to write global histories of science.
My second book project, Submarine Futures: Science and Expertise in the Indian Ocean 1872-2004, traces human engagements with the ocean through three objects: the shipwreck, the nuclear submarine, and the deep-sea port across key nodes in the Indian Ocean. This project explores how scientific disciplines like maritime archaeology continue to shape notions of the Indian Ocean’s “cosmopolitan,” inter-connected pasts.
SELECT WORKS
[with Alexis Rider and Felice Physioc] “Flows of History: Water in the Past and Present archive,” Past and Present (forthcoming).
“Mapping Oysters and Making Oceans Across the Northern Indian Ocean 1880-1925”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 65:1 (January 2023): 53-80.
“Seeing like the Sea: A Multispecies History of the Ceylon Pearl Fishery”, Past & Present 254:1 (February 2022): 127-160.
[with Sarah Qidwai], “South Asia’s Place in the History of Evolutionary Thought” in Global Histories of Science and Religion, edited by Bernard Lightman and Sarah Qidwai (University of Pittsburgh Press, forthcoming)
PUBLIC SCHOLARSHIP
“Ecology’s Ghosts” Hypocrite Reader
“Death at the Pearl Fishery” Hypocrite Reader
“The Forgotten History of Slavery in Sri Lanka” Sunday Observer
[with Kalyani Ramnath], “Histories of the Enslaved in the Indian Ocean World: Nira
Wickramasinghe” Borderlines
“Liqiud Power: South Asia’s attempts at Regulating Water” Himal Southasian
This is Hell Radio: On Disease, Death and Labour at the Colonial Pearl Fishery
Lankan History Page @lankanhistory
PERSONAL WEBSITE: tamarasfernando.com