Sajdeep Soomal is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Toronto who examines how chemical ideas and practices have influenced colonial political economies. His dissertation project, The Chemicalization of Substance, argues that modern chemistry transformed the tactics and techniques of 19th-century Canadian settler colonial governance. He introduces the concept of “chemical governmentality” to reveal that Canada’s staples economy increasingly relied on chemistry to commodify lumber, grain, oil and gas, and critical minerals by the turn of the twentieth century and to argue that chemical operations—from dissolution to catalysis—transited beyond the laboratory, generating novel tactics of socio-political governance. For example, through archival research at Library and Archives Canada and the University of Toronto Archives, he has demonstrated that the chemical principle of solvency was not only widely deployed for resource extraction and commodity formation but also taken up by government officials such as Sir John A. MacDonald and Duncan Campbell Scott to formulate the assimilatory policies of the Department of Indian Affairs. He argues the Department’s genocidal fantasy of resolving “the Indian problem” through intermarriage was strongly influenced by chemical theories put forward by Canadian ethnologists, who wrongly contended the blood of Indigenous people was soluble when mixed in the settler body politic.

His dissertation research has been generously supported by the TRU Doctoral Fellowship (2025-26), the IECS Graduate Fellowship in Sustainability Transitions (2024-25), the Northrop Frye Centre Doctoral Fellowship (2024-25), the Ontario Graduate Scholarship (2023-25), the Graduate Student Scholarship for Studies in the History of Ideas (2023-24), the Jeanne Armour Graduate Scholarship in Canadian History (2020-25) and the Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholarship (2020-23). Research from the dissertation has been submitted to Science, Technology & Human Values.

His second book, Frederick Soddy and the Chemical Origins of Ecological Economics, traces the origins of ecological economics—an area of economic thought with increasing importance in our era of environmental crises—to the chemical and economic ideas developed by Nobel Prize-winning radiochemist Frederick Soddy (1877-1956) in early 20th-century settler colonial Canada and imperial Britain. Studying this connection reveals how steady-state ecological economics and its modes of calculation are caught up in scientific frameworks of the colonial past, opening space to reconsider the field’s conceptual commitments in light of ecological pressures, scientific advances, and new political demands.

Sajdeep Soomal works on related curatorial projects about the politics of chemical visualization with artists who are re-imagining, playing with and altering our synthetic surround. He is currently revising articles related to his curatorial practice for Engaging STS and Labour/Le Travail. He currently serves as a board member of InterAccess, Sanghum Film and Foundation Chamar. Sajdeep has previously conducted research and curatorial projects for the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA), The Reach Gallery Museum, Trinity Square Video (TSV), the South Asian Visual Arts Centre (SAVAC), and the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives (CLGA). From 2015-2016, he held the Archie Malloch Fellowship in Public Learning at the Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas (IPLAI) at McGill University. He holds a BA in History from McGill University and an MA in History from the University of Toronto.