About

Research

I Too Have Some Dreams

My main research area is South Asian literature–especially in Urdu, Hindi, and Persian (Farsi)–but my new research involves other languages, including Punjabi, Bengali (Bangla), and Braj Bhasha. My book I Too Have Some Dreams: N. M. Rashed and Modernism in Urdu Poetry, was published by University of California Press in August 2014. I have made a resource page for the book here.

I am also completing a separate volume of translations of N. M. Rashed's poems that are organized thematically. This volume supplements the translations included in I Too Have Some Dreams, which are limited to those related to its argument. This book makes additional dimensions of Rashed's poetry accessible to English speakers and includes notes on themes and individual poems.

Cutting across this research agenda is my exploration of methods and issues associated with digital humanities. I have been involved in computational humanities research related to South Asian literature and language for over a decade. I use computational methodologies to supplement my research in literary history, working with texts on both macro and micro levels.

I have started work on a second book project titled “Publics of Sound: The Politics of Literary Innovation in Modern South Asia.” Through chapters focused on individual writers and movements, the book maps out the politics of sound and musicality in the discourse and practice of poetic modernism in Urdu and Hindi. That book will combine literary historical methodologies with what I call “data-rich analysis” of text and performance. I use digital tools to seek and identify patterns in a multilingual modernist corpus from roughly 1900 to the 1980s, drawing on a richly annotated collection of texts and performances. “Publics of Sound” focuses on Hindi and Urdu but also involves other languages and poetic traditions, as well.

While the literary historical aspects of this project grew out of research for my first book, the computational techniques grew out of a very productive collaboration with computational biologists  in using bioinformatic algorithms to detect the meter of Urdu poetry. I have extended our initial work to include free verse in Hindi and Urdu. I have expanded my toolkit to include methods from computational linguistics and natural language processing, as well as computer and data science, adapting techniques developed in those disciplines to my literary research. I was fortunate to receive an Andrew W. Mellon New Directions Fellowship which allowed me to take advanced courses in data and computer science as well as linguistics at Michigan State University and at the Linguistics Institute over twelve months. In addition to my literary historical writing, I have forthcoming software and technical papers exploring the intersection of natural language processing and digital humanities and on methods for developing and producing annotated digital texts and performances.

Through my work in digital humanities, I have developed a research interest in digital culture, especially in relation to South Asian poetry, and I hope to soon be publishing in that domain, too.

I have completed a few projects on second-language acquisition involving digital technologies. I have taught Hindi and Urdu language, and I am excited about the possibilities of language learning and teaching online. I have received minimal training in SLA, all of it postdoctoral, but I do consider it a tertiary field of my research, as well as a component of my teaching and service.

Teaching

I am currently on sabbatical and so will not be teaching until Fall 2018.

At MSU, I am the faculty director for a new minor program in Indian and South Asian Languages and Cultures. That involves language learning or competence in any of the numerous languages of South Asia as well as additional elective courses. I recently taught a class on Language, Literature, and Belonging in South Asia, and will be reteaching it in Fall 2018 as well as developing a lower-level undergraduate Introduction to South Asian Cultures class for Spring 2019. I have also taught a course on “Gandhi's India in History, Literature, and Film” as part of MSU's integrative studies program.

I also coordinate MSU's Hindi/Urdu language program, working with our new assistant professor who is a specialist in second language acquisition.

I have a joint appointment in MSU's undergraduate and graduate program in Global Studies in Arts and Humanities for which I have developed three classes and am currently developing a fourth. My first lower-level course, “Encountering Difference: East-West, North-South,” focuses on the historical development of ideas of civilization over the longue durée, through readings of Hafiz, Goethe, Iqbal, Conrad, Tyeb Salih, and Shahid Ali. I encourage students to look at ideas of civilization in contemporary discourse and cultural production. I developed a second lower-level course on “Global Espionage: Identity, Intelligence, Power” that highlights key concepts in global studies and theory through readings of spy fiction and film that reflect the geopolitics of the era of high colonialism, the Cold War, and the contemporary post-9/11 world. Much of that class focused on the area of the “Great Game,” including India, but with excursions into the war in Vietnam and Cyberspace. More recently I taught an upper-level undergraduate course on migration entitled “Partition, Displacement, and Cultural Memory.” It addresses the displacements caused by the partition of states through the twentieth century, focusing particularly on Ireland/Northern Ireland, India/Pakistan, and Israel/Palestine. In Fall 2018 I will teach a new course on Global Digital Cultures.

I am also part of the faculty for MSU’s certificate program in Digital Humanities, for which I developed the “Digital Humanities Seminar.” That course focused on the question of how to deal with the big data of the digital age, and how we can use digital tools and technologies to empower our analysis, criticism, and creativity. A hands-on class that mixes theory and practice, the course culminated in a final project for the students and involved various faculty members from units throughout MSU. I am developing a new course for Spring 2019 tentatively titled Data and the Humanities.

Service

My service at MSU has primarily been oriented towards my college, Arts and Letters, mostly in regards to the programs mentioned above, as well to my department—Linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian, and African Languages, which will soon be part of the School of Language Science and Literary and Cultural Studies. I also work extensively with the Asian Studies Center and the Muslim Studies Program, both part of International Studies and Programs at MSU.

From 2014-5, I served as the Director of the Digital Humanities program, and I stepped down from that position to take the Mellon fellowship. During my tenure, I worked to solidify and plan for the future of the Digital Humanities program, which was still fairly new. At that time, we identified three areas of strength: global engagement, cultural preservation and access, and computation. My colleague Kristen Mapes and I, together with an expanded steering committee, organized a Global Digital Humanities Symposium, that is now scheduled to run for its third year. It was supported by nineteen units (programs, departments, and centers) of the university.

In 2009, I brought MSU into the American Institute of Pakistan Studies and have since served as MSU's representative on its Board of Trustees. I also served on its Executive Committee for three years. I am very happy to be assisting with the workings of the Institute, which primarily involve supporting scholarly research and teaching about Pakistan as well as facilitating scholarly exchanges between Pakistani and U.S. academic institutions.

I currently serve on the editorial board of two journals, the Urdu/English journal Bunyaad, published by the Gurmani Centre of the Lahore University of Management Science (LUMS), and Sagar: A South Asia Research Journal, published by the South Asia Institute at the University of Texas at Austin.

Background

I am currently on sabbatical until Fall 2018 and affiliated with the South Asia Institute at the University of Heidelberg. I am very impressed by my new German colleagues and by Germany in general.

In summer 2014, I was awarded tenure and promoted to associate professor at Michigan State University. I moved to East Lansing and started working at MSU in 2008.

Immediately before that, I was a research associate for two years based at the University of Chicago at the (now unfortunately defunct) South Asian Language Resource Center, where I coordinated South Asian language materials development and teacher training on a national level. At the U of C., I also had an opportunity to teach advanced literature classes in Urdu and Hindi. I love Chicago and have very happy memories from that stage of my life, most especially the birth of my daughter.

Before Chicago, I had the wonderful opportunity to attend graduate school at Columbia University in the city of New York. I began in the M.A./Ph.D. program in what was then called Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures, and is now the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS). I then entered the Comparative Literature and Society program, eventually earning a Ph.D. in Middle East and Asian Languages and Culture and Comparative Literature and Society, which is quite a mouthful indeed. Frances Pritchett was my Ph.D. supervisor. In the course of my Ph.D. research, I lived in India, mostly in Delhi, for one year on a Fulbright fellowship. I also spent most of a summer in Chandigarh studying Punjabi.

The year before starting graduate school, I lived in Lahore, as a student of the Berkeley Urdu Language Program in Pakistan (BULPIP), which was great. I also had an opportunity then to do a little traveling in northern Pakistan, which was amazing.

Before that, I was an undergraduate in the city of Berkeley at the University of California, where I majored in South and Southeast Asian Studies and in Religious Studies. I blame the late Aditya Behl, my undergraduate advisor and later also a member of my Ph.D. committee, for luring me to South Asian literature and to academia.

I was born and raised in the city of San Diego, California.

Personal Interests

I enjoy computer programming, and I am currently excited about the Python language, which I find very readable, quick, and easy to use. I used to program more in Perl and before that in Java. For web-based work, I have also used PHP and Javascript, as well as XSLT. I like the content management system Drupal quite a bit, but I wish it was written in Python, and I generally prefer static pages these days. I also use C/C++, R, and Matlab/Octave. Back in the day, I worked in Pascal, Basic, and Assembly, and I have very hazy memories of Logo.

My other mostly indoor hobbies include reading, music, and cooking.

Outside, I enjoy traveling, hiking, biking, bird watching, skiing, being by or in water (both fresh and salt), and scuba diving.

Last Updated 10 January 2018