Department of History’s Tamara Fernando Named 2025 ACLS Fellow

For more than 100 years, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) has supported individual scholars and scholarly teams around the world in their pursuit of research with the potential to advance knowledge in the humanities and interpretive social sciences. Tamara Fernando, an assistant professor in Stony Brook University's Department of History,was among 62 international scholars to receive a prestigious 2025 ALCS Fellowship in recognition of excellence in humanities and social sciences research.

"The ACLS is a dream fellowship that will allow me to travel to be closer to my archives and give me time to focus on my research," said Fernando.

ACLS Fellowships provide up to $60,000 to support scholars for six to 12 months of full-time research and writing. The ACLS Fellowship Program is funded primarily by the ACLS endowment since its founding in 1919; this year, the program will award more than $3.5 million to 62 scholars selected from a pool of over 2,300 applicants through a multi-stage peer review process.

"ACLS is grateful that we are in a position to continue to fund this vital research that advances our understanding of human societies and cultures," said ACLS Vice President James Shulman. "Representing many different fields of study - including African diaspora studies, art history, English, gender studies, musicology, philosophy, religious studies, and more - this year's fellows demonstrate the importance of foundational humanistic inquiry in helping us to understand a wide range of questions concerning our collective and varied histories, narratives, creations, and beliefs."

Fernando's forthcoming book with Harvard University Press is Shallow Blue Empire: Pearl Diving in the Indian Ocean 1850-1925. In it, she foregrounds a story that is crafted as a multi-sited history of pearling, rather than a history of pearls.

"I was frustrated by the ways that we fetishize the coveted, lustrous commodity that ends up in museum displays, royal palaces and galleries, highlighted under museum lights and safely nestled glass boxes, while at the same time remaining largely ignorant of the undersea environments and the human labor regimes around pearling," she said. "The aim of the project is not to say that commodities do not matter, but rather to encourage exploration of these other angles."

Fernando describes herself as a historian of the nineteenth century, and said that virtually every pearl on sale in a market in New York or Paris in 1900 came from one of two places: the Gulf of Manar, which is between South India and Sri Lanka, or shores of the Southern Coast of the Persian Gulf, in sites that we now associate with contemporary nation states like Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates or Kuwait.

"The period that I work on in South Asia and the Middle East saw the rise, consolidation and growth of the British Empire," she said. "Although this was a decisive political break, there were, nonetheless, continuities in terms of local hierarchies of work and knowledge that persisted across these shorter political timescales. In this book I'm really interested in how pearling knowledge was specialized to coastal communities, and how it fared under empire in each site."

Fernando, who works across multiple languages and archives, enjoys that her research is not contained within national boundaries: pearl divers from Kuwait show up in the Sri Lankan National Archives just as shark charmers from South India are registered in the Myanmar National Archive. Over the next year, Fernando hopes to continue to conduct her research on the history of the Northern Indian Ocean world.

"I work on the history of three different sites that are far apart, and the connections between them," said Fernando. "I'm hoping to go back to either Kuwait or Qatar for a few months, and then maybe to Sri Lanka for more work on the archives there."

"Tamara's ACLS fellowship is a testament to the quality of her research and scholarship, and I'm so pleased to see her current work and its tremendous potential recognized in this way," Carl W. Lejuez, executive vice president and provost. "I'm grateful to ACLS for its vital support for humanities research and early-career humanities researchers and scholars, and it's wonderful to see a Stony Brook historian win this prestigious and competitive fellowship alongside researchers from our nation's leading research universities."

"As a fellow historian, I could not be more proud of Professor Fernando for this significant recognition of her path-breaking book project, Shallow Blue Empire: Pearl Diving in the Indian Ocean, 1850-1925, by the ACLS," said David Wrobel, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. "This honor comes at a pivotal moment when recognition of research in the humanities and social sciences is more important than ever."

"I'm pretty far along with this pearling book," she said. "My goal is to complete the book sooner rather than later, which would give me more time to explore and get creative back in the archives. I love working at Stony Brook, but the places and people I study are far, far away. I'm excited to return to those sites and then, in turn, bring that knowledge from South Asia and the Middle East back to Stony Brook."

- Robert Emproto