Dr Chitra Ramalingam
Visiting Research Associate 2010-11
I am a historian of science focusing on how physicists 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 related projects. The first is a book manuscript based on my dissertation, "A Science of Appearances: Vision,Visualization, and Experimental Physics in Victorian England," which uses the history of the observation and visualization of the electric spark in Victorian physics to explore connections between the emergence of a "modern physics" and the emergence of nineteenth-century "visual modernism." The exceedingly transient electric spark was both a theoretically problematic and a perceptually challenging scientific object. By reconstructing the visual techniques used by scientists to manage sparks' appearance--not only in private experiment but in public performances, textual descriptions, and reproducible images--we can begin to understand how problems of vision in physics were implicated in wider shifts in the conceptualization of human vision, the nineteenth-century fascination with optical illusions, and the emergence of new visual media like photography and cinema.
The second is a research project at the Science Museum, London, on the material culture of "seeing transience": optical toys and instruments designed to bring the instantaneous and ephemeral into view. My third project is an interdisciplinary study of William Henry Fox Talbot at the intersection of Victorian photography and science. In connection with this project I co-organised an interdisciplinary workshop on Talbot as scientist, scholar, and photographer, at CRASSH in June 2010.
