STUDENTS | Tathagat Bhatia

Tathagat Bhatia is a historian who studies the data practices of earth and environmental scientists who constitute planetary processes through mathematical formalisms, laboratory models, and fieldwork. They are interested in the politics of data access and sharing, particularly in South and Central Asia from the mid-twentieth century to the present. They treat contestations over access to various formats of planetary data, from hefty earthquake catalogues of Cold War years to contemporary digital climate databases, as an epistemic question that is entangled with broader projects of decolonization, development and postcolonial worldmaking. Drawing on approaches from the history and anthropology of science and STS, their project spotlights the humble, quotidian and tedious scientific and extra-scientific labor of producing, storing and sharing data to narrate a more down-to-earth history of the planet.

Tathagat holds a BA in STS and Russian from Penn and an MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge, where they were a Gates scholar. Prior to arriving at HASTS, they worked as a reporter for the Times of India. Their doctoral research has been supported by the MIT Center for International Studies and the American Institute of Physics.