Professor Wardaki is a historian of the Global South, with research interest in the history of knowledge, empire, and migration. Her research analyzes the formation of diasporic scientific communities, considering specifically the role of migrants in the circulation of scientific objects, ideas, and practices across Empire. 

She is currently working on her book manuscript, Decolonial Science: South Asian Migrants in interwar Germany and the Making of Modern Afghanistan (forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press), which examines the relationship between decolonization, science, and migration in colonial and postcolonial South Asia. Her previous article in Modern Asian Studies dealt with lithographic technologies in the Rediscovery of Indo-Buddhist Fine Arts among migrants in interwar Germany. Her essay on the history of dast kāri, a historically grounded epistemic formation anchored in the trained use of the physician’s hand, is forthcoming in Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society. Other works in progress include articles on the history of silk in South Asia, the history of technical manuals of the camera among an Urdu-speaking photographers, and the history of telegraphy in nineteenth century Afghanistan. Her recent essay for the Getty Research Institute analyzed a collection of albumen prints, The Qandahar Album, which examined the science of colonial photography in 19^th century Afghanistan.

Professor Wardaki holds a PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles in European and South Asian history. She joins Washington University from Yale University.