Prof.(Dr.) Anindita Nag

Prof. Anindita Nag, a cultural historian of modern South Asia, specializes in the history of science and technology, and visual culture. Her work focuses on the historical interaction of scientific knowledge and political economy, and how it influenced governance in colonial India. Her other research interests include how visual technologies like photography and digital media shape science, culture, and environment.

Her interdisciplinary approach to research and teaching is situated at the intersection of history and visual culture studies. She holds a Ph.D in History from the University of California, Los Angeles. She has held postdoctoral positions at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. After her PhD, she worked in the Sciences of the Archive research group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and more recently in the Histories of Planning research group. She was also a Max Weber Stiftung research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC where she was a member of the interdisciplinary research group on the Histories of Knowledge.

Her current research interests are twofold. First, a study of the relationship between visuality and touch, as understood through the lens of gender. The study combines methods from the history of science and the field of sensory studies to address how touch, both literal and metaphorical, is transmuted through visual objects. Her second research project sets out to show how big data and computational practices have converged to produce a fundamental reorientation of the “political” in contemporary India.

At the JSAA, she teaches courses on Modern South Asia and the Idea of the Aesthetic in modernity.