As a historian of empire and an Indian, I've been thinking through these two images all week. Braverman's concentration camp selfie expresses the symbolic order of Euro-American self and empire, the same one expressed by her USian imitators. Mamdani harkens instead to anti-colonial solidarity 1/

Apropos of my thread on language here's a translation. My husband doesn't speak Bengali and from the beginning of our relationship one of the ways he has gotten to know me is through translations I write for fun. This one by Buddhodeb Bose was for one of our anniversaries. "The morning in Chilka" 1/

I've been thinking about what language after colonialism becomes. As a South Asian of the English-speaking class (for English in India is a class), there was always something faintly shameful about my personal habitation of language. My English, as befitting my class, was cultivated with care. 1/

About to go into my first PhD defense in the history department and why do I feel like I'm the one about to be examined? I've hooded one doctoral student in Spanish and Portuguese before so it's not even my first defense! Tbf I still have anxiety dreams about exams before the first week of class 🗃️

Call for papers!

The Southwest Seminar on Colonial Latin America invites proposals for 2025 meeting hosted at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island on November 13 and 14, 2025.

Details at jcblibrary.org/news/call-pr...

The recording of my very first in-person book tour event for HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY from @ucpress.bsky.social, at @politicsprose.bsky.social in Washington, DC, is online:

💙📚 🗃 #ancient #medieval #earlymodern #histsci #histmed #18thC #politics #HAMH

www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7w6...

Distracting myself with reconstructing lost archives, as my country goes to war. Here's a glimpse of the Dattatreya cult in pre-colonial Goa, and the fascination that missionaries had with its prescriptions. In the 1560s, a convert brahmin called Manuel de Oliveira looted a library of texts 1/

Hello! I'm using this account to share my work, as I finish my second book, The Konkan: Mobility, Identity and History on an Indian Ocean coast. In that spirit, here's my latest adventures in teaching Indian Ocean at Georgetown. 🗃️#indiasky #earlymodern www.qatar.georgetown.edu/students-bri...