Research Fellows

Chitra Ramalingam

British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, 2011–2014

Research interests: Natural philosophy and the physical sciences from the late 18th to early 20th centuries; the visual and material culture of laboratories and experimental practice, science and performance; science in the urban public sphere, esp. 19th-century London; observation, visualization and imaging practices in science; optical illusions and optical toys; history and theory of photography; relations between photography and science; science and cinema.

Current research: My research explores how scientists devise highly refined practices of observation and visualization in the laboratory – how they see and make pictures – and how these ways of seeing and picturing are connected to the wider visual culture in which they also take part.

I am currently working on three projects. The first is a book manuscript titled To See a Spark: Experiment and Visual Experience in Victorian Science, which uses the history of a single scientific object, the electric spark, to track how physicists managed their visual experience in the laboratory. I am also beginning a new research project, 'The archives of experiment', that places physics within the broader material culture of nineteenth-century knowledge, asking how the keeping and ordering of images, artefacts, and textual records of experimentation have mattered in the physical sciences. Finally, I am working on a set of projects on the history and theory of early photography, interrogating the ambiguous place of the photographic medium between science and art through the visual and material culture of early nineteenth-century experimental science. As part of this I am co-editing a volume of essays by art historians and historians of science on the photographic pioneer and Victorian gentleman of science William Henry Fox Talbot.

Recent publications

• William Henry Fox Talbot: Beyond Photography (co-editor, with Mirjam Brusius and Katrina Dean), forthcoming November 2012. Under contract with Yale University Press, series in 'Studies in British Art'.
• 'Introduction: Beyond Photography' (co-author with Mirjam Brusius) and 'The most transitory of things: Talbot and the science of instantaneous vision', chapters in William Henry Fox Talbot: Beyond Photography (above), forthcoming 2012.
• 'Natural history in the dark: seriality and the electric discharge in Victorian physics'. History of Science 48 (September 2010), 371–398.
• 'Fixing transience: photography and other images of time in 1830s London'. In Time and Photography, ed. Jan Baetens, Alex Streitberger, and Hilde Van Gelder, Leuven University Press, 2010.