The listing below includes examples of my academic work across disciplines: some of it experimental, some more conventional in scope but not approach. While the work is spread across multiple disciplines, two major threads run through it — (1) art and architecture, and (2) political thought.
Government
For Prof. James B. Murphy’s GOV6: Introduction to Political Thought, I did an exegesis of the following passage from Plato’s Republic [401c–d]:
“Instead, mustn’t we look for craftsmen who are naturally capable of pursuing what is fine and graceful in their work, so that our young people will live in a healthy place and be benefited on all sides as the influence exerted by those fine works affects their eyes and ears like a healthy breeze from wholesome regions, and imperceptibly guides them from earliest childhood into being similar to, friendly toward, and concordant with the beauty of reason?”
For Prof. James B. Murphy’s GOV63: Foundations of Political Thought, I did an exegesis of the following passage from Aristotle’s Politics:
“Heterogeneity of stocks may lead to faction — at any rate until they have had time to assimilate. … Most of the cities which have admitted others as settlers, either at the time of their foundation or later, have been troubled by faction.” — Aristotle, Politics, V.3, 1303a13
For Prof. James B. Murphy’s GOV 63: Foundations of Political Thought, I wrote a comparison and evaluation of the possible devolution of monarchy into tyranny using Aristotle’s Politics and 1 Samuel. I conclude:
“Allegorically read, the story of Saul is a Biblical rejoinder to those peoples who aspire to have forms of government they are ill suited for, and a consideration of the possibility that even ideal kingship can devolve into the form of government Aristotle would define as tyranny. As such, Aristotle and the Bible agree: when the King, Saul, “transgresses traditional limitations” (V.10, 1310a39), including the law of the land, and starts ruling in an arbitrary manner that is clearly outside or in direct violation of the norm — in this case, the Word of the Lord — the most ideal form of government can turn into the most perverse and corrupt form. The allegorical claim in the Bible, thus presented above, is true when evaluated against Aristotle’s standard. It is not that all monarchs are corrupt: both the Bible and Aristotle agree on this. The Biblical examples of David and Solomon show that when granted with an ideal king, a polis can prosper beyond its wildest dreams and fulfil to the extent possible its potential for good. Aristotle, as can be surmised, holds Kingship in the highest regard — it is, for him, the most ideal form of government — but recognises the potential for it to devolve into tyranny.”
For Prof. Kevin Reinhart’s class, REL29.01: Religion in the Modern World, I used the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (the RSS), an Indian Hindu Nationalist organisation, as a case study to examine the link between religious and political ‘reification’ and economic growth. Read the case study here.
For Prof. Bernard Avishai’s class, GOV20: Capitalism and Government, I examined whether markets are self-regulating in ways that are conducive to liberal democracy using the works of Sir Isaiah Berlin, John Maynard Keynes, Joseph Schumpeter, Friederich Hayek, and Herbert Spencer to argue:
“A liberal democracy that truly values freedom will strive to prevent “the destruction of human values” will find itself ensuring that freedom and its resultant human values are protected, for that is a sine qua non. What is good for the individual business may not be good for the economy or society, and if we find ourselves equating the directive principles of state policy with those same principles that would optimise profitability, for that would result in regulation riddled with the composition-division fallacy. It seems inevitable that the “liberty of some must depend on the restraint of others,” whether it is man as an economic creature or man as a civilised one.”
Read this paper here.
English
For Prof. Nirvana Tanoukhi’s ENGL54.04: Introduction to Aesthetics, I wrote a paper exploring the everyday aesthetics of architecture. I turned my attention to the aesthetics of everyday housing instead of the grand architecture that I spent most of my time looking at as a student of art history. On Pruitt-Igoe, I noted that:
The house became the world, instead of being the building block of the world, and the floors became spaces for mandated interaction between residents of the complex that had little else in common save for a need for ingress and egress.
Read the paper here.
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What happens when a human-programmed, computer-generated model statistically plies through a corpus of Hegel texts — and produces a work that draws from the philosophy of Hegel in a meaningful way? This project was an undertaking for ENGL65.02: Writing with Algorithms, a class taught at Dartmouth College by Kyle Booten, Neukom Institute Postdoctoral Fellow. The class focused on natural language processing using Python, and I used this opportunity to combine my multidisciplinary interests and readings to produce a text. To complete the ‘feel’ of the book, I typeset it and designed a cover. Click on the cover or click here to open the book as a 6 x 9 inch PDF.
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For Prof. Alexandra Halasz’s class, ENGL54.15: The History of the Book, I wrote a paper entitled ‘The Political Economy of Publishing: Twin Literary Capitals in Colonial and Post-Colonial Societies’. This paper builds on the model for the study of the book first put forth by Adams and Barker in A New Model for the Study of the Book, while accounting for both cartographical and cultural space in a cultural exchange marked by colonialism and a city uniquely characterised as an economic capital free from the trauma of politics. London and Bombay form the bedrock of this new construction of the ‘literary capital,’ building on the notion of the same expressed by Pascale Casanova in The World Republic of Letters. Using case studies and both contemporary and historical analysis, this paper analyses a field of cultural production to arrive at a model that attempts to compensate for and display accurately cultural exchanges between imperial European capitals and their South Asian colonies. Write to me for a copy of this paper; the model I presented is below:
Art History
For Prof. Elizabeth Kassler-Taub’s ARTH89.05: Theory and Methods class, I wrote a paper that examined the Hood Museum of Art’s Virgin and Child with Saints altarpiece by Perugino and his workshop, using a mix of computational methods and cultural and social history to trace back the origins of the work, its original context, and attempting a reconciliation between Homo Aestheticus and Homo Economicus. Read the paper here.
Humanities
For Prof. Samuel Levey and Prof. Mark William’s humanities class, HUM3.01: Humanity by Design, I turned my eye to architecture. I examined at length the work of the architect Peter Eisenman through the lens of a famous debate between Peter Eisenman and Christopher Alexander at Harvard in 1982, concluding that Eisenman’s postmodernism is incompatible with humanism:
“In 1982, Peter Eisenman and Christopher Alexander met at the Harvard Graduate School of Design to debate in front of an audience of students and faculty. What conspired was one of the most influential physical debates on architecture as we now recognise it. Eisenman [b. 1932], who started his career as a ‘paper architect’, had only managed to realise two of his series of experimental houses by the time he turned fifty, and with no significant commissions in sight, was at the moment best confined to the intellectual and proverbial paper. On the other hand, Alexander [b. 1936], just four years younger than Eisenman, had started his career at an architectural firm right out of Cambridge, and by 1982 he had intervened significantly in the world of architecture. However, there was no question that both figures were, at the time, immensely influential in the architectural fraternity, and the debate was akin to the Victorian ‘Battle of the Styles’ — a fight for the fundamental essence of architecture.”
Read this paper here.
In my concluding paper, I compared Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and Norman Foster’s Reichstag restoration, both in Berlin, looking at the political potency of architecture in a democracy, while mourning the loss of memory at the memorial in Eisenman’s postmodernism. Read this paper here.
