Acknowledgements

sidebar-image-manuscriptIN GRATITUDE

Although this project bears my name as author-curator, I was only able to complete it thanks to the support of numerous individuals to whom I owe enormous gratitude.

For their help with securing images, texts, and translations, and for sharing their thoughts in areas of their expertise, I want to especially acknowledge the valuable assistance of Danna Agmon, Muzaffar Alam, Paolo Aranha, Rifat Bali, Milo Beach, Catherine Benkaim, Bob del Bonta, Jorrit Brischgi, Elizabeth Chenault, Owen T. Cornwall, Anita Dawood, Rich Freeman, Christoff Galli, Irina Glushkova, Deborah Hutton, Abusad Islahi, Jyotindra Jain, Monica Juneja, Ruqayya Khan, Steven Kossak, Marcia Kupfer, Bruce Lawrence, John Martin, Michelle Maskiell, Sy Mauskopf, Fattaneh Naeymi-Rad, K. Narasimhan, Hammad Nasar, Amina Okada, Ketaki Pant, Karen Pinto, Kapil Raj, William Reddy, Yael Rice, Marika Sardar, Nilanjan Sarkar, Raja Sarma, Emilie Savage-Smith, Benjamin Schmidt, Barbara Schmitz, Tamara Sears, Yuthika Sharma, Ellen Smart, Carolien Stolte, Susan Stronge, Wheeler Thackston, Andrew van Horn Ruoss, Brett Wilson, Elaine Wright, and Ines Zupanov.

I had the good fortune of having this project discussed in some detail at a workshop convened by the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University in November 2013. I thank Muzaffar Alam, Monica Juneja, and Morgan Pitelka for their expert commentary, and David Bell, Abby Collier, Carl Ernst, Emma Flatt, David Gilmartin, Mark Olson, Philip Stern, and Denis Wood for their critiques. A special thanks to Pika Ghosh for taking time out from her own schedule of writing to offer insightful observations, and persuasive encouragement to complete the project!

I presented a draft version of this work in May 2014 at the National Humanities Center, and I am grateful for the opportunity, and thank Cassie Mansfield for arranging the event, and Evelyn Higginbotham, Martha Jones, Nora Fisher Onar, Tim Marr, and Heather Hyde Minor for their responses that helped strengthen the work.

My Duke colleagues Paolo Mangiafico, Liz Milewicz, Will Shaw, and Victoria Szabo drew on their considerable digital humanities knowledge to provide advice. Without Kevin Smith’s expertise, negotiating the thicket of legal issues involved in digital projects such as this one would have been infinitely more difficult.

I am also very grateful to the staff of Duke’s Interlibrary Loan division who tirelessly secured several rare books, many from international repositories. Jack Edinger of the Visual Media Center of the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies, prepared many of the high quality digital images in the album, and Jennifer Prather designed the beautiful website that hosts it.

Edward Proctor, South Asia librarian at Duke, first alerted me to Turning the Pages (TTP) and to the British Library’s use of this software, pioneered by Michael Stocking at Armadillo Systems in London. Michael and his staff diligently worked with me over the past year and more in designing and producing this work. It goes without saying that without them, this project would not have taken the shape that it has.

Some of the research for this project was supported by a grant from the Arts and Sciences Council for Faculty Research at Duke University, for which I am very grateful.  I was encouraged to venture into the world of digital publishing on account of receiving a Mellon Faculty Book Manuscript/Digital Publishing Workshop grant from the Franklin Humanities Institute, for which I owe thanks to its Directors, Ian Baucom and David Bell. The Institute’s Associate Director Christine Chia, and staff members Conal Ho and Beth Monique Perry helped in numerous ways, big and small, to oversee completion of this work, and I am very grateful to them for their impeccable assistance over the past year and more.

Not least, for her copyediting skills, I want to thank Karen Carroll at the National Humanities Center, where I was in residence in 2013–14 when completing this project.

September 2014
Durham, NC

 

 

 

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