S. Prashant Kumar

S. Prashant Kumar is Assistant Professor of the History of Science and Technology. His research deals with the social and intellectual history of mathematics, astronomy, and empire. 

Kumar's current book project, The Light Threshers: Time, Caste, and Computational Labor in South Asia is a labor and intellectual history of time. The first part of the book shows how South Indian forms of technical and scribal labor were crucial to the computational regime which underwrote the East India Company's revenue system. Observatories turned light into a time signal which could be used by revenue surveyors mapping taxable lands and merchant mariners navigating treacherous coastlines alike. So the problem of maintaining the simultaneity necessary for colonial rule required the creation of a vast (yet often unreliable) bureaucracy for the processing of light. But under colonial rule in South Asia, clock time---the astronomically determined 'now'---and historical time---the textually determined 'then'---came to be linked, practically and intellectually, whether through the need to convert calendars, or loftier attempts to correlate European and South Asian knowledge systems and cosmologies. The book's chapters examine how a range of actors constructed, participated in, and resisted various forms of temporal reckoning, ranging from sacred history to telegraphy, and from relativity to postcolonial calendar reform. By the middle of the twentieth century, the subcontinental-scale writing machine assembled to thresh light, to turn it into signal or science, would come to have far reaching consequences for ideas about science and modernity in the wake of decolonization.

He is also an Honorary Fellow at the Archives at NCBS, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bengaluru, a collecting center for the history of science in modern India. During 2025-26, he is collaborating with archivists to acquire, arrange, and describe papers relating to the Indian space program, with funding from the American Institute of Physics. Prior to joining UGA, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge, at the University of Chicago; a Research Scholar at the Archives at NCBS, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bangalore; a Postdoctoral Fellow in Global Intellectual History at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin; and a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Haverford College. 

Previously trained in theoretical physics, Kumar received his PhD in History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania in August 2021.