4. Teaching

I teach in the English Department at Shiv Nadar Institute of Eminence. My courses explore how we read, represent, and interpret culture across forms: novels, archives, photographs, interfaces. Some courses are grounded in literary studies; others draw from digital methods, visual studies, or curatorial practice.

My approach moves between close reading and systems thinking. My lectures are not scripts. They are conversations with the room. They meande and draw from different fields. They are alive to what emerges. We always know where we start; we never know where we might end up. That looseness is deliberate. It allows ideas to surface in unexpected ways, and helps students approach questions without flattening them into method.

While my teaching is conversational and sometimes experimental, my talks are more structured. I try to write toward clarity and to make an argument. I see them as opportunities to think aloud, but with care. Each talk begins as a piece of writing. I aim to be respectful of time and audience, and I try to be specific about what I’m trying to say. These are not summaries or previews. Many of my essays began this way.

Over the years, I’ve spoken on networks at a mathematics conference, on generative art to a general audience, and, at a recent plenary, on the very foundations of the field I work in. These talks don’t always sit neatly within disciplinary lines, and that’s part of the point.

Occasionally, I teach workshops on working with data in the humanities. I do it when asked, and because I think more people should feel able to do this kind of work. These workshops are usually small, focused, and tailored to the people in the room, whether they're students just beginning to work with texts and tables, or researchers trying to make sense of a dataset they’ve inherited. We talk about cleaning, modelling, visualising. But we also talk about when not to use a method, and how to sit with uncertainty.

The goal isn’t mastery. It’s confidence. Enough confidence to ask better questions, or to take a next step.