3. Writings

There is a particular kind of professional anxiety that comes with not having a clean answer to "what do you work on." I have watched colleagues develop a single, defensible specialisation over years, building depth that commands respect, that fits neatly on a grant application, that can be explained at a dinner party without watching someone's eyes glaze over. I have not managed this. I am not sure I ever wanted to.

My work moves between photographs and archives, computational tools and institutional critique, Bengali literature and Hindi cinema, the material life of paper and the fragility of servers. I write fiction occasionally. I build software. I have given talks at a mathematics conference and a plenary on the foundations of my field and a workshop on OCR for nineteenth-century periodicals, sometimes in the same semester. The thread connecting these things is real, but it is not the kind of thread that shows up well on a CV.

The cost is genuine. Spread thin enough, you lose the depth that makes certain kinds of arguments possible. You are always a visitor in someone else's conversation, always reading to catch up, always slightly uncertain whether you belong at the table. Funding bodies want focus. Reviewers want expertise. The evaluative systems that govern academic life are built for people who have stayed in one lane.

But I have never been bored. Not once, in twenty years of this work. There is something that happens when you carry a question from one domain into another, when you notice that the problem of what survives a malware attack and the problem of what survives censorship are structurally the same problem, when the thing you learned building a collation tool turns out to matter for thinking about how photographs circulate in melodrama. The connections are not always publishable. But they are, for me, the point.

I have made peace with this, mostly. The work is scattered. The map of it looks like several different people's careers laid on top of each other. I think that's fine.

Oh. And if you are here, for some strange reason, for my published works, you are out of luck. They aren't here. But, send me an email, ask nicely, and I will probably send them across to you.