Devika SHANKAR
Assistant Professor
Undergraduate Coordinator
Devika Shankar is a historian of modern South Asia and the Indian Ocean region. Her research interests primarily lie in environmental history, legal history and science and technology studies. She is the author of An Encroaching Sea: Nature, Sovereignty and Development at the edge of British India 1860-1950 (Cambridge University Press, 2025) which looks at the history of coastal change and port development in southwestern India. Her work has also appeared in Past and Present, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Itinerario, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies and Indian Economic and Social History Review. She is currently working on two research projects, one focused on technological interventions in the Palk Strait and the other on the history of salt extraction in India. She has also co-developed a public and digital history project on South Asian migration to Hong Kong. For more information on this project see https://sahk.history.hku.hk/
Room 10.43, Run Run Shaw Tower
EDUCATION
BA, University of Delhi
MA, Jawaharlal Nehru University
MPhil, Jawaharlal Nehru University
PhD, Princeton University
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Modern South Asia
Indian Ocean
Environmental history
Legal History
Science and Technology Studies
Books
Cambridge University Press
2024
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BOOK AWARDS
COURSES TAUGHT
- HIST1022, Introduction to Environmental History
- HIST2181, A Sea of Stuff: Commerce and Colonialism in the Indian Ocean
- HIST2182, Seascapes and Skylines: Environment and Infrastructure in Asia
- HIST2188, Making of Modern South Asia
- HIS2215, Global Environmental History: From Columbus to the Climate Crisis
- HIST3029, Global and Transnational History
FELLOWSHIPS & GRANTS
- Visiting Research Associate, India Institute, King's College London, 2022-23.
EXTERNAL AFFILIATIONS
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
- “A Contingent Commodity: Boston, Bombay and the Fall of the Global Ice Trade”, Itinerario (Forthcoming, 2026).
- “Bombay and its Environment” in Bombay Framed: People, Memory and Metropolis (DAG, 2026).
- An Encroaching Sea: Nature, Sovereignty and Development at the Edge of British India (Cambridge University Press, 2025).
- “Port Environments in South Asia.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 44, no. 1 (2024): 81–85. Co-written with Chandana Anusha and Ayesha Omer.
- “A Harbor That Never Was: Examining the ‘Failure’ of Port Development in Colonial Tuticorin.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 44, no. 1 (2024): 148–163.
- “A Forest of Ships: Malabar’s State Forests and Bombay’s Dockyards, 1795-1822,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies (2023).
- “Water, Fish and Property in Colonial India, 1860–1890,” Past & Present 258, no. 1 (2023).
- “A Slippery Sovereignty: International law and the Development of British Cochin,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 64, no. 3 (2022).
- “A Monsoon Miracle: Naming and Knowing the Mudbanks of Malabar,” in Terra Aqua: The Amphibious Lifeworlds of Coastal and Maritime South Asia (Routledge, 2022).
- “Contested Lands and Contentious Lines: Land Acquisition for the Railways in late 19th and early 20th century Delhi,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 55, no. 4 (2018).