Tamara Fernando

Tamara Fernando is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Stony Brook University's College of Arts and Sciences. She holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge (2022) and is currently on research leave until Spring 2027. She has also been appointed as a Shelby Cullom Davis Center Fellow at Princeton University for Fall 2025.

Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of histories of labor, environment, and science, with a particular focus on the nineteenth and twentieth-century Indian Ocean world. She employs trans-regional and interdisciplinary methods to study the global histories of science, examining how scientific knowledge is produced in specific historical and geographical contexts across the Indian Ocean littoral.

Dr. Fernando is the author of the forthcoming book Shallow Blue Empire: Knowing the Littoral across the Indian Ocean, which offers a 'history below the water line' through a trans-national account of the pearling industry across the northern Indian Ocean. Her second book project, Submarine Futures: Science and Expertise in the Indian Ocean 1872-2004, traces human engagements with the ocean through shipwrecks, nuclear submarines, and deep-sea ports. Her scholarly work demonstrates consistent engagement with themes of colonial science, maritime labor, environmental history, and the Indian Ocean world, with publications spanning from nineteenth-century pearl fisheries to contemporary issues of settler tourism in Sri Lanka.

Dr. Fernando has received recognition for her work, including the Shelby Cullom Davis Center Fellowship at Princeton University. Her public scholarship appears in venues such as Hypocrite Reader, Himal Southasian, and the Sunday Observer, demonstrating her commitment to engaging broader audiences with historical perspectives on contemporary issues.

She has published in prestigious journals including Past & Present, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and History of Science. Her recent work on 'Settler Tourism' examines the growing confluence of global tourism with settler colonial structures and ideologies in Sri Lanka, particularly in the context of Israeli tourism following the October 7, 2023 attacks. Her research on colonial pearl fisheries explores how epidemic diseases like cholera intersected with colonial labor systems, demonstrating how the body became a site of both control and resistance.