Event invitation: Prof. Nirmala Menon visits Seattle University to talk about digital humanities

What Is Digital Humanities—and Why Does It Matter Now?

This talk will examine the emerging areas of research in Digital Humanities in India by an examination of the term “Digital Humanities” and its uneven and uncertain trajectory in the Indian research ecosystem. As with other systems around the world, DH in India is complex and contextual land each of us involved in the disciplinary practice encounter resistance and skepticism. Resistance to what is perceived as a deliberate distancing from the larger Humanities queries, scepticism about appropriating the rhetoric of STEM disciplines merely as a tool for greater legitimacy and validation. But of course DH is far more than a sum of its criticisms and scepticisms. I will address why it is imperative that the digital be harnessed, critiqued, deconstructed and dissected precisely so that the issues that Humanities scholars have been invested in continue to be at the centre of the development, deployment and dissemination of technology. Using the example of Decolonizing Knowledge Systems through Scholarly Publishing, I underscore the need to make knowledge productions multilingual and accessible to students and researchers in different parts of the country and the role of Open Access India in making education access a little less unequal than it is now. I will discuss IIT Indore’s Project KSHIP, the DH journal, the DST Sponsored SINDHU project and the Electronic Litt from India anthology- and some of the continuing challenges in Humanities research infrastructures.

Bio: Professor Nirmala Menon is Chair Professor at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Indore, where she leads the Digital Humanities and Publishing Research Group and serves as Chair of the JPN National Centre of Excellence in the Humanities. She is also an Affiliate Research professor with the University of Oxford and currently a Fulbright Fellow with Northeastern University, Boston MA for the year 2025-26. Her research spans interdisciplinary areas such as postcolonial studies, digital humanities, and multilingual scholarly publishing, with a sustained focus on decolonizing knowledge infrastructures. Menon is the author of Migrant Identities of Creole Cosmopolitans (Peter Lang, 2014) and Remapping the Postcolonial Canon (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), and co-editor of the first multilingual volume of electronic literature published from India. Her recent book Practices of Digital Humanities in India: Learning by Doing edited with Maya Dodd looks at DH projects conceptualised and contextualised in India. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Digital Humanities Intersections (DHI) and serves on the editorial boards of Digital Humanities Quarterly and several Routledge book series. She is a founding member of DHARTI (Digital Humanities Alliance for Research and Teaching Innovations), has been a Governing Board member of ADHO, Vice President of CenterNet and is also serving on various national research committees. Prof. Nirmala has published extensively in leading international journals and led numerous nationally and internationally funded projects that advance digital and multilingual scholarship.