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Tamara Fernando is an incoming assistant professor at Stony Brook University, New York, and a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Historical Research, London. Her research focuses on the intersection of labor, science, and the environment in the area of the Indian Ocean at the turn of the twentieth century. Her archival work focuses on a close examination of the pearl trade. Rather than reconstructing a commodity history of pearls, she concerns herself with how pearl divers' labor and the submarine oyster reef allow us access to historic oceans. She is interested in submarine histories, histories below the water line, animal histories, and blending methods from the environmental humanities to find out how this might affect labor and the history of science.
RCC Research Project: Of Mollusks and Men: Diving for Pearls in the Indian Ocean 1850–1925
Selected Publications:
- “Mapping Oysters and Making Oceans across the Northern Indian Ocean 1880–1925.” Comparative Studies in Society and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.
- with Sarah Qidwai, “South Asia’s Place in the History of Evolutionary Thought.” In Global Histories of Science and Religion, edited by Bernard Lightman. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, forthcoming.
- with Alexis Rider and Felice Physioc. “Writing the History of Water: Lessons from the Past and Present Archive.” Past & Present (forthcoming).
- “Seeing like the Sea: A Multispecies History of the Ceylon Pearl Fishery.” Past & Present 254, no. 1 (February 2022): 127–160.
- “Ecology’s Ghosts.” Hypocrite Reader 97, April 2021. https://hypocritereader.com/97/ecologys-ghosts.
- “Death at the Pearl Fishery” Hypocrite Reader 95, July 2020. https://hypocritereader.com/95/tamara-fernando-mannar-pearls-cholera.