يدعوكم معهد سجال لحضور محاضرة مع الدكتورة تمارا فيرناندو عنوانها "تأريخ -من تحت سطح "البحر- عمليات الغطس والبحث عن اللؤلؤ: تدوين التاريخ عبر المحيط الهندي

Sijal Institute invites you to attend a lecture with Dr. Tamara Fernando titled "Histories below the Water Line: Writing History across the Indian Ocean."

In this talk, Dr. Fernando will present an overview of her current research project, which is a history of pearling in the Indian Ocean during the period of high British imperialism, from roughly 1850-1930. she will give a brief history of each of the sites she studies: colonial Ceylon, Burma/Myanmar, and the Southern Persian Gulf, regions which supplied 90 percent of the world’s pearls until 1930 and employed hundreds of thousands of men to dive for pearls (لؤلؤ). In the late nineteenth-century, as each of these sites was integrated into the British Empire, they not only witnessed large-scale transformations in their submarine environments, but they were also key sites for working out our modern ways of meeting the sea in political, legal, and ecological terms. In this talk, Dr. Fernando will explain why it makes sense to tell stories from these diverse places together, and how law, labour and environment relate to one another here. She will also give a brief overview of some of the archives and materials she uses to write “histories below the water line” ranging from oyster specimens, shark charmers, scientific publications, divers’ petitions and oral histories to sea captains’ logbooks!

Biography

Tamara received her BA in History and Literature from Harvard University. She completed an MPhil as a Harvard-Cambridge Scholar at Jesus College, Cambridge, and holds a PhD from Cambridge University. She is currently a Past & Present Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research in London and an incoming Assistant Professor in the History of the Global South at SUNY Stony Brook in New York. Her book manuscript, Shallow Blue Empire is forthcoming with Harvard University Press (scheduled: 2025). She has held fellowships at the Rachel Carson Center in Germany, and at Georgetown University Qatar and Doha Institute Qatar. Next fall her classes include “Beastly Encounters: Animal History in Asia” and “Science at Sea.”