Dr. Chitra Ramalingam

Research Statement

I am a curator and academic working between history of science, history of photography, and museum studies.  As a museum worker and independent curator, I’ve worked with science museums, natural history museums, special collections libraries, and art museums, most recently as curator of photography at the Yale Center for British Art from 2017-2021, where I integrated approaches from cultural history and history of science into exhibitions on photography’s early history.  As an academic I’ve taught in history of science programs, history of art programs, and history departments. My courses focus on the visual and material culture of modern science, and on the laboratory and the museum as sites of hands-on knowing; in my research I focus on science in 19th- and early 20th-century Britain and its empire, as well as on photography and its relation to the sciences. One of the animating questions of my research on photography concerns the reasons and context for the medium’s ambiguous place between the sciences and the arts from its public emergence in 1839 to the present day. Does the history of photography look any different when we approach it from the perspective of the cultural history of science? 

Lately I have been working on experimental, collaborative projects and pedagogies around university museum collections. My ongoing research project, Out of Place, is a series of experimental installations (physical and online) involving re-situating objects from Yale’s natural history and scientific instrument collections.  The first, A British Mineralogy, includes a collaboration with Indian artist Garima Gupta, is an online project that explores the histories and layered geographies of mineral specimens in Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History and in British natural history collections, inspired/provoked by naturalist and artist James Sowerby’s monumental illustrated British Mineralogy (1804-1817) and Exotic Mineralogy (1811). The second, The Genuine and Most Surprising Account of an Octant’s Progress (organized in collaboration with Manon Gaudet), will be an experimental exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery in 2024, which will follow an 18th-century British-made octant–a scientific instrument used in astronomy and navigation–as it pilots a provocative course through the museum’s galleries, unsettling the static implications of museum displays and bringing to life the movements of museum objects through time and space, and the instability of interpretation. 

I have a long-standing research interest in the material lives and cultural meaning of glass artifacts in the history of science and the history of photography, from vacuum tubes and chemical glassware to lenses and glass plate negatives. Glass is one of the dominant materials of experimental science.  Its optical and physical properties mediate scientists’ interaction with the natural world. Embodied, artisanal practices around glass-making shape the hardware of experimental science, particularly in chemistry and physics, where test tubes, vacuum tubes, and other laboratory glassware have become iconic symbols of the scientific endeavor. As a photographic material, glass has had a powerful role in both forging and endangering the rhetorical “transparency” of the photographic medium–especially the fragile but powerful glass plate, the primary material for photographic negatives from around 1850 to 1925 (and in the practice of astronomy, until the 1990s). My presentation will range across these various ways that glass artifacts and glass surfaces have been implicated in debates over how we know what we know about the natural world.

Gallery