Hi everyone!
My name is Madiha Ghous. I am a doctoral candidate in the English department at MSU. I grew up in Azad Kashmir and did my honors undergraduate double majoring in English Language and Literature from the International Islamic University Islamabad (Pakistan). I moved to the US for graduate school where I did my masters in English from MSU and continued here in the PhD program. I am currently a Ruth A and John Yunck Endowed scholar in my department and also working as an Academic Advising Assistant for English and Film Studies undergraduate programs at MSU.
My research and teaching interests revolve around the areas of Critical Theory, Post & De-Colonial Studies, Global Anglophone Literatures, World Literature(s), Cultural Cold War Studies, Critical Muslim Studies, South Asia studies and Public Humanities. My dissertation project is a comparative literature project that looks at the discursive constructions of the region/idea of Kashmir through hitherto unexplored literary-cultural archives. It articulates the formation of national affect around Kashmir and in so doing investigates the operations of cultural and affective nationalism in public culture and foregrounds the emotional and affective dimensions that shape and sustain national identity.
My interest in digital cultural heritage and its methods is fairly new and it stems from my being intrigued by the rise of the Digital Humanities in the Academy in the recent years and a desire to explore its affordances in my own work: I want to make a time-sensitive effort to digitally archive materials of Cultural Heritage I am engaging with to help preserve them and allow them to be accessible for a bigger audience. I am also interested in exploring the affordances of digital methods and seeing the kinds of stories they allow me to tell with the cultural archives and narratives I am engaging with. As a Postcolonial Studies scholar, I am keen also to investigate the project of Digital Humanities from the perspective of the former: thinking for example, more critically about how to ensure that the digital methods we employ do not replicate the bias of Cultural Studies with its emphasis on and centrality of materials originating from the Global North and/or written in the English language. And I hope the fellowship will give me the opportunity to explore the line of thought and provide the knowledge and technical competence required to think about the interventions possible.
I have followed the incredible work that has come through the CHI fellowship in the past few years, and I am thrilled to be a part of this year’s cohort. The fellowship’s alignment with the ideals of Public Humanities resonates deeply with my own praxis as a scholar and instructor, which is committed to producing open-access, socially relevant, and democratic forms of knowledge. I am hoping the fellowship will provide me with the knowledge and technical skills required to participate meaningfully in the Digital Humanities moment, and more specifically, help me participate in and support efforts that preserve and disseminate cultural knowledge from a community that has received scant academic attention.
That’s all for now! More later. Ciao!!
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