Palak Vashist is a historian of labor and childhood whose work examines how colonial governance shaped the lives of young workers in South Asia. She holds a Ph.D. in Childhood Studies from Rutgers University and earned her B.A., M.A., and M.Phil. in Modern Indian History from the University of Delhi.
Her doctoral dissertation, Stitching Age and Labor: Child Laborers, Factory Schools, and Colonial “Protection” in Bombay Textile Mills (1880–1911), introduces the concept of the “industrial child” to capture the ways children were counted, excluded, or ambiguously positioned within the colonial factory system. By showing how age was produced and contested through inspections, school enrollments, and medical certifications, her research rethinks the politics of protection and regulation in industrial settings.
Palak’s scholarship has been published in Entremons: UPF Journal of World History and Living Histories: A Past Studies Journal, and in the edited collection Childhoods and Youth in India: Engagements with Modernity (Springer, 2023). She also has a forthcoming essay in Junctures in Women’s Leadership: Feminist Knowledge Production (Rutgers University Press, 2025).
At the Institute for Spatial History Innovation, Palak serves as Research Associate and Managing Editor of the World Historical Gazetteer. In this role, she manages large-scale digital history projects that integrate multilingual datasets and connect regional histories to global frameworks. She brings extensive archival and analytical expertise to ISHI’s mission of advancing innovative and accessible approaches to world history.