Dr Shankar Nair

Postdoctoral Researcher

Shankar’s research focuses on the social and economic history of science and technology and its relationship to the history of empire in South Asia. He is interested in the global and comparative history of science and technology, with an emphasis on production and knowledge embedded in practice. 

As Postdoctoral Researcher on the Colonial Standards project, his research seeks to bring the collections in the History of Science Museum at the University of Oxford in conversation with practitioners and users of mathematical instruments in late colonial India, tracing the institutional arrangements, the various ways of knowing, and forms of labour that went into the construction of knowledge in surveying, astronomy, and navigation as these ideas and techniques travelled across the world.