Tamara Fernando

Bio:

I am a historian of labor, environment and science, specializing in the modern Indian Ocean world, with a particular focus on Sri Lanka, the Southern Arabian Gulf and Myanmar. 

My first book Shallow Blue Empire: A History of Pearl Diving in the Indian Ocean World 1850-1930 (Harvard University Press, 7 July 2026) takes one of the emblematic circulating commodities of the Indian Ocean – the luxury gemstones known as pearls – and asks what this history would look like from “below the waves.” I approach the so-called global “Pearl Boom” through the vernacular environmental knowledge of pearl divers working in the Gulf of Mannar, the Persian Gulf and the Mergui Archipelago, attending both to embodied work and environmental change. This approach, I suggest, allows us to write narratives of global capitalism that foreground human and non-human realities of work and knowledge that enable commodities to come into being in the first place.

My second book expands these maritime and labor links from Lanka’s coasts across the Indian Ocean world into the Mediterranean. I am presently researching a project that interweaves the entangled stories of Catholic liberation theology, Marxist-Leninist activists, and labor migration between Sri Lanka’s coastal “Catholic belt” and Naples, Italy in the twentieth century.  I remain interested in networks of trans-national work, knowledge and race that undergird concepts like global capitalism. 

I write more broadly in global environmental history and the history of science. With Brooke Penaloza-Patzak, I am co-editing a special issue for History of Science on “Making Science of Things: Objects in and between the natural and human sciences.” I have also written on the history of the reception of evolutionary thought in nineteenth-century Sri Lanka, on histories of water, on multi-species histories and on oceanic methods. Beyond academic publications, my writing has appeared in The New Inquiry, Hypocrite Reader, Himal Southasian, Polity (Sri Lanka). See for instance a recent reflection on the politics of Lanka’s changing coastline, co-authored with Praveen Tilakaratne here. 

I offer courses on animal history and British imperialism, on the history of rivers in South Asia and the Middle East, on global labor history and on histories of migration. 

Select Works:

[with Alexis Rider and Felice Physioc] “Flows of History: Water in the Past and Present archive,” Past and Present 261:1(August 2023): 1-31. 

“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], “Debating Evolution and Religion in Nineteenth-Century South Asia” in Evolutionary Theories and ReligiousTraditions: National, Transnational, and Global Perspectives, 1800-1920, edited by Bernard Lightman and Sarah Qidwai (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023). 

“පර්සියානු බොක්කෙහි සිට ලංකාව වෙත මුතු කිමිදෙන්නන්ගේ සංක්‍රමණ, 1881-1925” [The Migration of Persian Gulf Pearl Divers to Ceylon, 1881-1925], ප්‍රවාද35 [Pravada, Journal of the Social Scientists Association, Sri Lanka](August 2020) 

“Ecology’s Ghosts” Hypocrite Reader. 

“Death at the Pearl Fishery” HypocriteReader. 

“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. 

"On Disease, Death and Labour at the Colonial Pearl Fishery" This is Hell Radio. 

"Settler Tourism," Polity.