Ph.D., History, University of California, Los Angeles | USA, M.A. in History, University of Calcutta | B.A. (Honors) in History, Presidency College, Kolkata
Dr. Anindita Nag is a Professor at the Jindal School of Design and Architecture (JSDA). Her research and teaching interests straddle the disciplines of histories of science and technology, urban studies, and media history.
Her wider work focuses on two complementary lines of inquiry. First, it explores the centrality of urban design and planning within the larger context of architecture and the built environment. Her work has explored histories of planning through everyday objects culminating in the publication of an edited volume, The Planning Moment: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (New York: Fordham University Press, 2024).
A second line of inquiry explores how visual and aural technologies have shaped science, culture and the environment. In this regard, her work has ranged from a study of the epistemic values of photography; the role of graphics and illustration in the circulation of scientific knowledge, the effects of big data on Indian politics to sound and materiality in colonial India.
She is currently working on two projects. The first, a collaborative project called “Smartness as Wealth” and funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, Germany, is a study of the relationship between contemporary smart urbanism and wealth through a focus on smart cities as sites of venture capital speculation and ecological catastrophe. (http://smartnesswealth.net/)
Her second research project is an archival and ethnographic study of sound and music, with a focus on the intersections between sound technologies, listening practices and urban environments in twentieth century India.
Dr. Anindita Nag received her Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Los Angeles, USA followed by a postdoctoral fellowship position at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany. She was also a Max Weber Foundation Fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington DC, USA. Previously, she has held teaching positions at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India and more recently, was a visiting faculty at the Technical University in Dresden, Germany.
She welcomes inquiries from prospective Ph.D. students interested in working on any aspect of modern South Asian history, as well as on topics in urban history, and the history of science and technology.
