About This Blog

I started blogging in 2004, on my first research sabbatical. You can see the first iteration of the blog hosted on Lehigh's server here (2004-2010). As of fall 2025, Blogger tells me I have written just under 1500 posts. 

Early Posts from the Blogosphere era (2004-2010)

For those first few years, I posted quite frequently on all manner of topics -- essentially the way people today might post on social media or microblogging platforms like Twitter/X or BlueSky. I had some early success with that writing, in part because at that time the number of people with my range of interests who were very active online was quite small. There was also a reciprocating community ethos amongst academic bloggers at that time -- people would often use the format to engage in debate and dialogue with other academic bloggers, crossing personal narrative with serious intellectual engagement. For a time, the blog was drawing about 1000 readers a day. (Unfortunately, the trackers I had placed on the older site no longer work, and I have no idea which of the old posts are still getting read.) 

My excitement about this new form of public writing and intellectual engagement was reflected in a scholarly essay I published in 2008, "Anonymity, Authorship, and Blogger Ethics," for the journal Symploke. 

For some of this time, I was also participating in group blogs, one called Sepia Mutiny (dedicated to South Asian American issues) and another called The Valve (literary studies). Sepia Mutiny was for a time very influential in the second-generation South Asian American community, and it hosted a lively comments section (which today would be more efficient as a Reddit or Discord server). At its peak, it was getting 10,000 readers a day or more. It was exciting to be what we would today call an 'influencer' -- publishers would contact us asking us to review new books; journalists would ask for comments and opinions on various things; we would sometimes get free tickets to things, etc. I even remember back in 2008 when a young, recent college graduate who was aiming for a career in comedy emailed me to ask me to review his new short film "Manoj." (The maker of that video did go on to do some pretty great things!) 

Starting around 2010, blogs started to lose their relevance as newer modes of social media became prevalent; everyone was moving to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, especially for casual writing, life updates, and image-sharing. I did not aim to cross over to these new formats, preferring to focus more on my academic writing. That said, I was surprised when in 2012, a blog post I wrote responding to the mass shooting at a Sikh Gurdwara at Oak Creek, Wisconsin went slightly viral. I later rewrote the blog post for the New York Times. 

While for many today blogging might seem quaint (even the word feels weirdly obsolete, like talking about a floppy disk or a game cartridge), I continue to find the format helpful as a way of quickly making materials available online, especially materials related to my research and teaching. 

For better or worse, I'm still here... 


Highlights from the 2010s-2020s

A few of my academic blog posts have been especially popular and successful even with the shift away from blogging. Two of my 'explainers' in particular have had tens of thousands of readers: "Mimicry and Hybridity in Plain English" (read more than 50,000 times) and "'Can the Subaltern Speak?' in Plain English." (read more than 30,000 times). Both of these started as teaching notes, and were adapted to public-facing essays. 

In recent years, I've also been periodically posting things related to digital humanities and AI, and these seem to have found readerships as well. Two I might recommend might be my how-to for Sentiment Analysis and my how-to for text processing using Regular Expressions. 

Writing About South Asian Literature

I have never been entirely sure why, but two long blog posts about South Asian literature, my essay on Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi, and another on modern Hindi poetry, have long been among my most popular posts. I probably should have reworked both essays for scholarly publication at some point. Now I'm not sure I'll ever bother to do that. 

Between 2010-2012, I was contemplating writing a book on South Asian Modernisms, and along those lines I wrote a number of blog posts that still hold up fairly well: 


I am not entirely sure why the plan to put together a book based on the research reflected above fell through. One issue was certainly my own limited ability to read in Indian languages. Another was the sense of being overwhelmed by the vastness of the subject...  

(I still am planning to rework my essays on A Suitable Boy, written during the height of the COVID-19 lockdown in the spring of 2020, for publication... )

Writing About the South Asian Diaspora / South Asian America 

I have also written quite a lot over the years about issues affecting South Asian Americans. One obvious starting point might be the post I mentioned above, on the Sikh experience after the mass shooting at the Oak Creek Gurdwara in 2012. 

But there are many others as well. Here are a few of them:  


Again, the plan for a book on "Brown" topics fell apart somewhere in there. I think the main reason was that I started to realize that the drive to make "Brown" a fixed racial identifier was inherently problematic. It can be used casually, sure: South Asians, Latinos, and MENA folks can all identify as Brown. But the idea of asking for a new 'official' color indicating racialization to be added to the sociological lexicon is probably not going to work. For one thing, "Black" is a special category and identifier with deep historical roots; "Brown" is at best an analogy that appropriates from Blackness. Also, South Asians and some Latinos might both be Brown, but they are pretty far apart and unlikely to emerge as a "bloc" anytime soon. (Some of my discomfort at the longstanding appropriation of Black civil rights language amongst progressive Brown activists can be seen in my MLA talk from 2021.) 


Overlap with Digital Collections Projects

A big part of my research output since 2015 has been linked to digital collections, often using the Scalar platform. I have written about some of those projects in blog posts over the years as well, and many can be accessed on the sidebar to the right, so I won't link to any here. Suffice it to say, my experience writing this blog dovetailed nicely with my growing interest in digital humanities research and digital projects. 

The guiding ethos behind nearly all of my writing online has long been oriented towards making knowledge and resources accessible both physically (i.e., the actual texts) and conceptually (i.e., through clear and 'plain English' explanations).  

Popular Posts From Recent Years

Most popular post of 2025: AI/Humanities Conference
Most popular post of 2024: New Course on AI / Science Fiction
Most popular post of 2023: Can the Subaltern Speak? in Plain English (30,000+ readers!)

Most popular post of 2022: On Academic Freedom and Civility
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