Project Description

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RESEARCH AREAS:

  • Environmental History

  • History of Science and Technology

  • Digital History

CONTACT:

  • cmandur2@uwo.ca

CHARAN MANDUR

Doctoral Student;
Department of History, Western University

I am a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Western University. I completed undergraduate degrees in both History and Science, with a minor in Physics at the University of Waterloo, and an MA in History. My research focuses on environmental history, the history of science and technology, and digital history. Currently, I am working on a history of NASA’s analog missions.

I am writing an environmental history of NASA’s analog missions from the 1960s to the present, utilizing digital research methods. An analog mission entails travelling to extreme Earth environments to train astronauts, conduct soil and mineral analysis, study lifeforms, and assess the viability of equipment such as rovers in preparation for navigating lunar and planetary environments. I focus on the ways the thoughts of researchers evolved with scientific discoveries, advances in technology, and growing information about planetary environments.

My research is almost entirely focused on NASA’s digital sources, because I want to demonstrate the possibility of all-digital historical research in an age of rapid digitization, while illustrating how digital research methods can provide different avenues of analysis than traditional methods. Using the programming languages, I create programs that sift through the digitized documents, pulling out key events, people, words, dates, mission objectives, and so on, index and cluster the information, and provide visualizations of the results. This distant reading helps me focus on the documents’ significant characteristics, finding patterns that would not be evident from close reading. It also helps me identify the documents that need to be studied in depth. The digital findings are then contextualized to create a coherent narrative. My dissertation seeks to show how it was possible and why it was useful to find analogies between terrestrial and extraterrestrial environments.

HISTORY 2198B: Special Topics – Untold Science, Western University, January 2025 – April 2025 (Lecturer)

HISTORY 2201E – Canada’s Past: A Critical History From the Origins to the Present, Western University, September 2024 – April 2025 (Teaching Assistant)

HISTORY 1840G – Graphic History!, Western University, January 2024 – April 2024 (TA)

HISTORY 1895F – History for Time Travelers, Western University, September 2023 – December 2023 (Teaching Assistant)

HISTORY 2201E – Canada’s Past: A Critical History From the Origins to the Present, Western University, September 2022 – April 2023 (Teaching Assistant)

HISTORY 2201E – Canada’s Past: A Critical History From the Origins to the Present, Western University September, 2021 – April 2022 (Teaching Assistant)

HISTORY 207: The Beatles and the Sixties, University of Waterloo, January 2020 – April 2020 (Teaching Assistant)

HISTORY 105: Rock n’ Roll & US History, University of Waterloo, September 2019 – December 2019 (Teaching Assistant)

Invited Lectures

“FLQ and the October Crisis”, HISTORY 2201E Canada’s Past, Western University, March 2025

Selected Publications

Baxter, Mary, Charan Mandur, Thomas Stroyan. “The Historian’s Role in an Age of AI: An Interview with Marnie Hughes-Warrington and Jo Guldi.” Text. NiCHE (blog), November 21, 2024. World. https://niche-canada.org/2024/11/21/the-historians-role-in-an-age-of- ai/.

Conferences

Mandur Charankamal and William Turkel, “Studying Direct-to-Consumer Television Advertising at Scale Using Mismatched Text and Video Descriptors”, Digital Humanities Summer Institute 2023 Conference & Colloquium, June 2023