Rahul Krishna Gairola, Ph.D. (U of Washington, USA), is Assistant Professor of English & Comparative Literature in the Department of Humanities & Social Sciences (HSS) at the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Uttarakhand, India.
He is the author of Homelandings: Postcolonial Diasporas and Transatlantic Belonging (Rowman & Littlefield International, London & New York, Sept. 2016) and co-editor (with Amritjit Singh and Nalini Iyer) of Revisiting India’s Partition: New Essays on Memory, Culture, & Politics (Orient Blackswan, New Delhi, October 2016/ Lexington Books, Washington, D.C., June 2016).
He is currently working on two book projects: the first critically re-thinks shifting meanings of “home” in digital identities & cultures of 21st-century South Asia, while the second examines gender and home economics in recalibrated kinship relations of migrants from rural regions of Garhwal to urban metropoles in North India. He is an Article Editor for Postcolonial Text.
Note on Digital Humanities
I have been interested in digital humanities and culture, and where and how both intersect with postcolonial and South Asian studies, for many years. I began curating these interests while a Lecturer at the University of Washington, where I attended DH sessions at The Simpson Center for the Humanities, and later held a modest Mellon Fellowship for The Humanities and Technology Camp (THAT Camp) at UW Bothell. Soon after, I organized and presented at MLA 2013 on “South Asian-izing the Digital Humanities,” the first panel of its kind to bring DH into dialogue with South Asian Studies. Since then, I have been involved in a number of DH events and workshops, most recently the Digital Humanities Summer School at Oxford University and the European Summer University in Digital Humanities at the University of Leipzig, Germany, in summer 2017. My current interests in DH include digital pedagogy, social and new media, digital literacy, mapping, and theoretical paradigms for re-thinking human subjectivity and its constitutive identities in the digital milieu.
Keywords
Postcolonialism, migration, diaspora, home, race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, nationality, intersectionality, cultural studies, social media, critical theory, world literature, ethnic American literature, film studies, Partition, South Asia, digital humanities, DH tool, DIY, mapping.
Projects
I am developing a few projects that deal with partition, Indian art history, digital literacy/ pedagogy, and and counter-mapping archives, and are in process over the next few years – including DH special topic issues of two reputable, peer-reviewed journals: South Asian Review and Asiascape.