Contact details
- Name:
- Mrs Tamara Fernando
- Qualifications:
- BA Hons. in History and Literature from Harvard College, and an MPhil in History from Cambridge
- Position/Fellowship type:
- Fellow
- Fellowship term:
- 2021 to 2023
- Institute:
- Institute of Historical Research
- Home institution:
- University of Cambridge
- Email address:
- tamara.fernando@sas.ac.uk
- Website:
- https://www.history.ac.uk/people/tamara-fernando-0
Research Summary and Profile
- Research interests:
- History
- Summary of research interests and expertise:
-
Tamara is a historian of the nineteenth and early twentieth century Indian Ocean. Her research has three main focal points: the construction of scientific knowledge about the ocean, the connected scientific, intellectual, and labour histories of the Indian Ocean between the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, and the question of how the scientific archive addresses histories of the non-human.
Her current research project, “Molluscs and Men: Pearling Labour and Environments in the Indian Ocean 1880-1925” is a history of three major sites of natural pearling in the Indian Ocean: the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Mannar between South India and Ceylon and the Mergui Archipelago in Southern Burma.
Tamara holds a BA Hons. in History and Literature from Harvard College, and an MPhil in History from Cambridge, which she completed as the John Eliot Scholar in Jesus College, Cambridge. She will complete her PhD at Cambridge in 2022.
Publications
(Advance access) “Seeing like the Sea: A Multispecies History of the Ceylon Pearl Fishery”, Past & Present
(forthcoming) with Sarah Qidwai, “South Asia’s Place in the History of Evolutionary Thought” in Bernard Lightman ed. Global Histories of Science and Religion
August 2020, “????????? ???????? ??? ????? ??? ???? ????????????? ???????, 1881-1925” [The Migration of Persian Gulf Pearl Divers to Ceylon, 1881-1925], ?????? [Pravada, Journal of the Social Scientists Association, Sri Lanka], 35
Public History
2021 April, with Kalyani Ramnath, “Histories of the Enslaved in the Indian Ocean World: In Conversation with Nira Wickramasinghe(Opens in new window),” on Borderlines, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (CSSAME)
2021 April, “Ecology’s Ghosts(Opens in new window),” in Hypocrite Reader, Issue 97
2020 July, “Death at the Pearl Fishery(Opens in new window),” in Hypocrite Reader, Issue 95