Vidhya Raveendranathan is a Doctoral Candidate at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, Georg-August-Göttingen University and a former doctoral fellow at the Centre for Global Asia, NYU Shanghai. In collaboration with researchers based at the French Institute of Pondicherry, she has been instrumental in building a 'Coastal Lives' digital archive. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies, History Compass, and the Journal of Urban History.