3. Writings

There is a particular kind of professional anxiety that comes from not having a clear answer to the question "what do you work on." I have watched colleagues build a single, defensible specialisation over years. It commands respect. It fits nicely on a grant application. It is the kind of thing you can explain at a dinner party without watching someone's eyes glaze over. I have not managed this, and 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, and the material life of paper and the fragility of servers. I write and publish fiction occasionally. I hope you never find it. I read philosophy of technology for pleasure. I enjoy playing video games, and thinking about them almost as much as playing them. I read widely, from nineteenth-century novels to trashy crime fiction. I build software. I have given talks at a mathematics conference. I have delivered a plenary on the foundations of my own field. The thread connecting all of this 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. You are always reading to catch up. You are never quite certain 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. Something happens when you carry a question from one domain into another. The problem of what survives a malware attack and the problem of what survives censorship turn out to be structurally the same problem. Something you learn building a collation tool ends up mattering for how you think about photographs circulating in melodrama. These connections rarely turn into anything publishable. They are, for me, the actual point of the work.

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, and I think that is fine.

If you are here looking for my published works, you can find the full list on my ORCID or Google Scholar profile.