Professor of the History of Science at the University of Regensburg — uncovering the invisible labor, marginalized practices, and embodied knowledge at the heart of modern science and technology.
"By uncovering the historical significance of the mundane and marginalized, we gain new and critical vantage points on the usual suspects of more standard historical narratives."
Omar W. Nasim is an award-winning Professor of the History of Science at the Institute of Philosophy, University of Regensburg (Germany). A specialist in the visual, cultural, and material histories of modern Western science, his interdisciplinary research spans astronomy, photography, design, philosophy of mind, and the politics of scientific labor.
His work shifts focus from scientific end-products to the meticulous, often invisible processes behind them — from hand-drawn sketches at the telescope to the architecture of the observatory chair. In doing so, he reveals how deep-seated cultural assumptions about gender, race, empire, and class are built into the very tools and practices of knowledge production.
Nasim has held fellowships at Oxford, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin), the University of Amsterdam, Case Western Reserve University, ETH Zürich, and the University of Basel. He directs Germany's leading Master's programme in the History of Science and has taught across six countries on three continents.
Canadian national. Professor at the University of Regensburg, Germany, since 2016. Active in North American, British, and European academic networks.
Nasim's research is organized around a fundamental conviction: that science and technology cannot be understood apart from the marginalized, invisible, and embodied practices that produce them. Working at the intersection of visual culture, material history, labor studies, and the philosophy of science, he pursues questions that standard histories leave untouched.
Recovering the hidden, often gendered and classed, labor that underlies scientific production — from observing notebooks to darkroom work with photographic plates.
Treating images, instruments, furniture, and photographs as co-constitutive of scientific knowledge — not merely illustrations of it.
A decade-long archival project across 36 collections in nine countries, investigating photography as material practice in global observatory networks, 1850–1950.
Decolonizing the history of science and technology by exposing the racial, colonial, and gendered assumptions embedded in its instruments, spaces, and personnel.
Demonstrating the epistemic centrality of hand-drawing, notetaking, and gesture in observational science — against rhetoric privileging the mechanical and digital.
Tracing the colonial underpinnings of optical-illusion tools in the brain sciences, connecting ornamental art history to early psycho-physiology and neuroscience.
The first systematic historical study of photography in the sciences that conceptually revamps our understanding of what photography as a technology is. Based on 36 photo-archival collections across nine countries, the manuscript is contracted with the University of Chicago Press for submission in early 2026. It situates astrophotography within global networks of observatories, industry, ecology, gendered labor, and colonial geography.
The first book-length study of mechanically adjustable observing chairs used by astronomers across Europe, Great Britain, and the United States in the nineteenth century. Situating these chairs at the intersection of moral, visual, and epistemic economies, Nasim shows how technologies of healing conditioned technologies of scientific observation — and how masculine science was encoded in postures that othered "Oriental" modes of knowledge. The book extends its analysis to Freud's orientalized couch, decolonizing observing furniture as a technology of scientific and therapeutic practice.
Against the assumption that handmade drawings are subjectively unreliable, this landmark study reconstructs — from hundreds of unpublished observing notebooks across six major archives — the ordered ways in which repeated telescope drawings were processed through years of paperwork into published engravings. Pencil, paper, gesture, and ritual emerge as essential technologies of astronomical observation in their own right, disciplining eyes, hands, and minds. Remains the most detailed interrogation of drawing practices in the service of science.
Situating Bertrand Russell within a long-forgotten controversy about the nature of perception among English philosopher-psychologists — one Nasim was the first to identify and demarcate — this book shows that Russell's logical constructions cannot be understood without restoring him to conversation with a marginalized group straddling philosophy and psychology as the two disciplines were institutionally pulling apart.
The first historical investigation into how photographs qua research-tools were handled as three-dimensional objects in the service of observational science. Drawing on 36 archives across nine countries, the book places astrophotography within global networks of observatories, industry (Kodak, Ilford, Agfa), ecology, gendered labor, and colonial geography. Draft completed; submission scheduled for early 2026.
Drawing on rich, compelling sources, The Astronomer's Chair is an original, provocative, and fascinating work.
David Kaiser · Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science, MITThis creatively illustrated study uses a seemingly mundane theme to reveal with startling insight and expert craft the complex cultures of comfort, attention, and discipline that governed nineteenth-century stargazing.
Simon Schaffer · Professor of History of Science, University of CambridgeNasim models thrilling new directions in intellectual inquiry — an interdisciplinary journey through the history of science, design, imperialism, and material culture.
Aviva Briefel · Edward Little Professor, Bowdoin CollegeNasim's teaching bridges the sciences and humanities, fostering interdisciplinary skills in students from physics, philosophy, engineering, art history, and literature. He employs close-reading of objects, images, concepts, and sites alongside thematic approaches that move from the familiar to the surprising.
His pedagogy has been recognised with multiple awards at the University of Kent, and consistently strong evaluations across Germany, Switzerland, the UK, the USA, Canada, and Italy. He currently directs the only dedicated Master's programme in the History of Science in Germany.
Professor Nasim welcomes inquiries from prospective graduate students, collaborators, journalists, museum professionals, and institutions with collections in the history of astrophotography or scientific instruments.
English (mother tongue) · German (advanced) · French (advanced reading) · Urdu (fluent speaking) · Arabic / Latin / Greek / Italian (reading knowledge)
History of Science Society (USA) · British Society for the History of Science · European Society for the History of Science · American Astronomical Society · Society for the History of Astronomy · Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Wissenschaften (DE)