The Digital Divan: Computational Approaches to Urdu Poetry

A. Sean Pue is a literary historian, translator, and digital humanist. He holds a Ph.D. in Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative Literature and Society from Columbia University. He is an Associate Professor at Michigan State University where he teaches classes in South Asian language and literature, global studies, and digital humanities. His first book, I Too Have Some Dreams: N. M. Rashed and Modernism in Urdu Poetry (University of California Press, 2014), contributes to both South Asian literary history and global modernist studies. It argues that Rashed’s poetry carved out a distinct role for literature in the maintenance of doubt, providing a platform for challenging the certainty of collective ideologies and opposing the evolving forms of empire and domination. Pue is beginning a new multilingual book project on poetic sound that addresses the politics of literary form using both traditional literary historical techniques as well as digital analysis of texts and performances. He blogs at seanpue.com.