HASTAC Dialogues | Challenging Canons and Traversing the Frontiers of Digital Literatures: A Conversation with Nazua Idris and Hiranya Mukherjee

On Sunday, 24 March 2024, HASTAC Scholars Nazua Idris and Hiranya Mukherjee met to have a conversation about their fields of research. As the conversation continued, both Nazua and Hiranya discovered that their research interests intersect as both of them pushed against the established canon in English Studies through their research. They started their conversation highlighting the impacts of their identities and positionalities on their scholarly and pedagogical practices. Then they moved on to discussing their future academic and professional goals and concluded the conversation with a fun chat about their favorite books, TV shows, films, and/or grames.   

This conversation is part of the HASTAC Scholars Dialogues program––an excellent initiative to engage with the HASTAC colleagues. However, the scope of the program extends beyond the individual dialogue as this blog post is published in an open-access form and invites the audience to engage with the issues discussed. We sincerely hope that you will find our conversation thought-provoking and engage with this post in a respectful and collegial manner.

Thank you very much for reading our stories and engaging with us!  

About the Discussants 

Nazua Idris (She/her) is a PhD Candidate in Literary Studies at Washington State University. Her research focuses on the intersections of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century global Anglophone literatures, scholarly textual editing, decolonial digital humanities, decolonial and digital pedagogies, and teacher education. Nazua obtained BA (Hons) in English and MA in English Literature from the Department of English, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, and a second MA in Literary Studies from the Department of English, WSU. Before coming to WSU, she worked as a full-time faculty in the Department of English, at East West University, Bangladesh. At WSU, she has taught courses in the Department of English and in the Department of Digital Technology and Culture. She has been working as an Editorial Assistant in the Oxford University Press scholarly editorial project titled The Complete Works of Edith Wharton since Summer 2020. Nazua is the recipient of several prestigious awards and fellowships including WSU’s Learning Communities Excellence Award 2020, Alexander Hammond Professional Achievement Award 2023, College of Arts and Sciences Doctorate Student Achievement Award in Humanities 2024, Dr. Karen P. DePauw Leadership Award 2024-25, WSU Chancellor’s Award for Leadership 2024, and WSU Graduate School’s Dissertation Year Fellowship 2024-2025. 

Hiranya Mukherjee is an independent researcher mainly interested in exploring the fields of Asian Studies, Game Studies, and Literary Studies. He graduated from Presidency University, Kolkata, India with a Master’s Degree in English Literature. He has published his research in academic journals such as Games and Culture by Sage Publications and the International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences. He is also a published author of a short story called “Bound”, inspired by the oeuvre of H.P. Lovecraft, that has been published in the collection titled Fables by the Cognition Tree Media and Publications. He has also presented his research in various national and international conferences such as the annual “Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) Conference, 2022” and the “Thirtieth Annual British Women Writers Association Conference, 2022”. He currently plans to go ahead on his academic journey towards a PhD by the end of this year.

Our Stories

1) To ease us into the process, I guess we could begin by exploring the factors that influenced us as we were growing up, maybe in school, to choose the present field of study and research. So I would like to go ahead and ask you about such influencing factors in your case!

Nazua: Initially I thought that I would pursue engineering, but I hated math, and I realized that I would have to part ways with it after graduating from high school! So when I was in school, I was in a sort of agreement with my family that I would either go into engineering or the medical field in college– but I gradually realized that Humanities would be a better fit for me. When I broached it to my parents, they initially recommended me to major in Law; but I chose English Literature because I always had a penchant for reading fiction and exploring narratives in general, both in my native tongue Bengali, and in English. Later on, as I grew more into the field, I had different avenues to branch out further into slightly different but related streams like Gender Studies, but I stuck with Literature, because, to me, it always seemed like a natural fit! How about you?

Hiranya: Actually, it’s kind of similar. But there are some differences as well. At least I can relate to the math part. There’s an irony that I will mention! I always had this inclination to go into academia because both of my parents are academics. My mom is a professor of English Literature, and my father is a professor of Mathematics.

Actually, I did a lot of jumping around because I couldn’t really decide where I actually fit in properly. I loved science, but I didn’t like math that much. For the last two years of school, we had to choose a stream so initially, I chose science. There was this very hyper-competitive toxic culture around science, especially at the end of high school, where you did not get enough opportunities in school to explore it at your own pace but rather had to cram and study it specifically to score for exams. Thus, studying those subjects became very mechanical and lacked a sense of organic attachment to the topics at hand. I couldn’t relate to the whole spirit behind this practice and thought that it was time for a change.

Thankfully, my school allowed me to switch from science to humanities midway through my eleventh grade. However, I had math, economics, and humanities. I really liked studying humanities— everyone was very nice, and the whole atmosphere was like day and night when you compare it with the experience I had with science classes. So, I decided that I would do one of the three things after my school––either I will go into economics or anthropology, or will go into English literary studies. So, as you can see, economics was the first and English was the last among the options I decided for my future academic career.

However, I could not get into the subject of my choice because of the extremely outdated system that exists in many colleges for undergraduate admissions. The colleges don’t conduct admission tests. So admission is solely based on the marks someone gets in their final exams. In my final high school exam, I had really good marks in economics, but I had decent marks in math, and the cut-off for math was really high. It was over 90%, which I didn’t have, so I couldn’t apply for economics.

My next subject of choice was anthropology, but there weren’t many good anthropology courses available at the college where I wanted to go, so I went to the next best thing––English Literature. I thought that since literary studies nowadays have become so interdisciplinary, I could integrate anthropology with it. In the beginning, it was a smooth fit for me, because growing up, I was exposed to what literature is supposed to be. I really enjoyed studying it. And then, I met a few people who are studying games as literature which I didn’t know you could actually do.  I still remember––during a philosophy lecture on Renaissance architecture, my instructor was teaching us Renaissance architecture and he brought Playstation 3 to the classroom. He hooked it to the projector, started this game on this big screen, and we were controlling the characters as he was moving around the town. It was Florence, and we were walking around the city, and he was explaining the design of the buildings. That class completely opened up a new world for me! Gradually I discovered that there are academic disciplines and scholarly journals dedicated to Game Studies. Since then, I have been researching games and visual storytelling. Even though I do also dabble sometimes in mythology and anthropology, But since I didn’t get training in those fields, I generally keep to literature and digital humanities. So yeah, that’s the story behind my choice of major!

2) How has your identity shaped your research?

Hiranya: Being from a socioeconomic scenario, where I grew up, I learned to speak Bengali and English almost simultaneously. I was equally exposed to regional literary traditions, art, music, and all the related fields as well as British and American literary and cultural traditions. Thus, I always saw myself as being embedded in the middle. My training in English literature has always been through a comparative lens. Most of the professors in my university were Bengalis. So when they taught an English text, for example, a play by Shakespeare, they would also refer to texts in Bengali that had similar themes. They would always compare and contrast, even though the English and Bengali texts belong to different cultures and times. Even though I was an English literature major, there was always that inherent comparative approach in my training. How I arrived at being interested in Game Studies: well, in my earlier training there was always a sense of pushing the boundaries and finding a sense of comfort in the liminal. That’s what I also find in the Game Studies. It’s a non-traditional medium––a space for exploring narratives that are not solely restricted to traditional forms, such as poems or novels or even films. I think that the excitement of pushing boundaries and exploring newer forms influenced me to go forward with this field and find a certain sense of stability within. Gradually I also found the confidence that I could bring this particular field into the scholarly conversations based on established “canon” and offer these narratives as alternatives. So, I think that’s how my background kind of influenced my choice of Game Studies as my academic discipline.  

How about you?

Nazua: I mean, I started with a traditional canon-based curriculum; however, when I started teaching after graduation, I realized that canon can be quite problematic in certain ways, especially because of their colonial and imperialist baggage and other such connotations. When I started my second MA program in the USA, I decided to do research that challenges the canon-based curriculum. Thus, I pivoted to the exploration of texts outside the canon and ways of approaching the Humanities, especially pertaining to pedagogy that goes against the established Great Tradition. I started working on building a corpus of non-canonical texts and figuring out ways we could teach such texts and build literature curricula using those so that a more varied and flexible approach is taken in the selection of texts; thus, my doctoral project sets forth an alternative body of narratives that challenge the insularity of stable canons. I felt a sense of historical responsibility in such endeavors as a person coming from South Asia, a region with a colonial legacy, and having been trained in a very traditional canon-based English education. I strongly felt the need to change things.

Hiranya: Yeah, I can relate with you on this as well. Sometimes, we take these traditions that we inherited from our colonial legacy as normative. But then we have to realize that we need to question who decides which texts are to be seen as the “foundational” texts. And why are we starting with a particular text first and how to move on? How is the progression decided? So yeah, there are a lot of questions that need to be asked.

Nazua: And I really like how you explained your perspectives about games. Because, as you know, the way we were trained in our culture, we are made to view games as hobbies. It’s been presented as something that you do during your leisure time. However, there are so many games that push the boundaries of the “canon,” challenge colonial legacies, and give voices to historically marginalized communities and their lived experiences in the form of multimodal narratives.  So it’s amazing that in our own ways we are both working toward pushing boundaries set by our colonial legacy.

Hiranya: Yeah, definitely. I mean, even today, people who aren’t really active in this field or are active in the academic field find it hard to view games as literature. When I tell them that I am researching video games, their next question is how can you research video games that you play for fun!  Even though often it is very difficult to explain it to them, I always tell them that “you can approach these games as stories.” I tell them how video game narratives are similar to books and plays, and so on.  So we can move on to the second one.

3) Can you talk more about your current research projects and what motivated you to engage yourself with them?

Nazua: Sure! I recently did a project with rural high school teachers across the US that was also influenced by my anti-canon stance. In the US, high schools have English Language Arts (ELA) courses that are still very canon-based. After talking to some teachers, I realized for example, the texts that they were using to teach the history of slavery were kinda problematic because some of them were using Huckleberry Finn to teach slavery, which raised my eyebrows! The goal of my doctoral research is not only to talk about non-canonical texts within the university circle but to find ways to incorporate those texts in secondary education to help students critically engage with the hidden ideologies that they may be subscribing to without even being consciously aware of it. I believe that learning to critically engage with canonical texts, putting them in conversation with the non-canonical texts, and being aware of how canons are formed and dispersed from the high school level will benefit the students in the long run. With this purpose in mind, I did this community-engaged project as part of my doctoral dissertation. For this project, I met with rural high school teachers via Zoom. I received a grant to purchase books and other pertinent resources for them. Together, we worked to design lesson plans based on the literary texts written by the BIPOC authors from the nineteenth century that can be implemented in their respective classrooms to further this spirit of inquiry and broaden the horizon of texts that are being incorporated into the ELA curricula. This anti-canon pedagogical stance was to a certain extent influenced by my prior work as a teacher in the Department of Digital Technology and Culture at Washington State University, where we used social and racial justice lenses to approach technology and digital humanities projects. In those classes, several students approached me and mentioned that they wished they could receive such training back in high school, as it all seemed such a new positive revelation to them in college. So that kind of inspired me to work on this project with high school teachers. 

How about you?

Hiranya: I am interested in exploring Gothic narratives and aesthetics in video games. During my undergraduate. I attended a conference on Frankenstein and the idea of monstrosity. The topic really opened up new ways of looking at literary texts for me. Even though I was always curious about how the authors put in “disturbing and weird” narratives that you find in ghost stories, gothic literature, stories about mental illness, and similar kinds of literary work. Listening to the presentations at the conference helped me look at those texts in a more academic manner. Also, there were a lot of people who presented their research in non-traditional ways. I remember one presenter in particular who studied the narrative of an instrumental sequence in a heavy metal song to explore how a certain Gothic narrative was present there. I really didn’t have any idea that you could do that. For the first time, I encountered so many different ways of approaching texts. Sometime after that, I started playing a game called Bloodborne that is based on a Frankensteinian plot where the discovery of a certain ancient source of power leads to people being addicted to that power and disrupting the natural creation process, which resulted in unnatural manifestations like Frankenstein. That game inspired me to see the connections between the analysis of literary texts and the analysis of game narratives.

4) How do you work against the Canon through your scholarly and pedagogical practices?

Hiranya: I’ll approach this question in two ways––1) I’ll mention how my work thus far has brushed against the canon and 2) I’ll mention how I see Academia would evolve in the future to change certain things that will go against the canon. I will start with Game Studies. Many of the established academics in the field of humanities still don’t recognize Game Studies as a legitimate field of study. For example, one of my friends is exploring different opportunities for his doctoral studies. He approached a professor to be his potential supervisor and the professor was interested in his work. However, he has incorporated game studies in his research. So, the professor said that his proposal looked interesting but he can’t work with games because that’s too far out for the professor. We still see this kind of reaction to Game Studies even though the attitude is slowly changing.  However, we cannot ignore games nowadays, because it has become an industry that is bigger than music, film, and books combined. That’s how it goes against the traditional way of studying literary texts.

One complaint I have against Academia, among others, is the whole peer-review process of publishing papers. So I, from what I’ve experienced. It tends to be very ambiguous. I guess people from all fields would agree that there is a huge compulsion to keep on publishing papers even though you might not have fully formed your ideas yet. Otherwise, you’re seen as not being productive enough in the field of research.

So yeah, these two things––general attitude towards game studies as a field of research and academic discipline and the pressure of being productive should change in the long run. There should be other metrics for measuring how active you are in the research field other than publications.  For example, how much outreach do you have outside academia? How are you communicating ideas to a general audience, for example, reaching people through non-traditional mediums like YouTube or blogging? Particularly in this age of digital technology, various forms of scholarly engagements should be considered instead of solely relying on impact factors and research papers in academic journals.

Nazua: I will start with the question of “recognition” in academia, which posits itself with a sense of friction with how I see academia ideally should be like. Even though the idea of scholarship and creativity has evolved so much with the growth of digital humanities, you are still considered “productive” and “scholarly” only when you have several published papers in high-ranked journals. When you work on projects that require a lot of effort and are less “canonical” in nature, for example, building digital projects, you are not considered as “productive” as you would be if you had published in journals. The irony is that even though building a digital project itself is the outcome of rigorous scholarly, creative, and technical engagements, one has to publish papers to establish their digital projects. I think another factor that should be integrated into evaluating scholarly activities is analyzing whether an individual is engaging with communities and how much effort they put in increasing the reach of their field of inquiry outside the immediate purview of academic conferences and journals, through, say for example, writing blog posts, organizing community-engaged projects and outreach, and so on. These look good on the CV but are often relegated to “secondary activities” pertaining to questions of securing a faculty position or getting a promotion when compared to the primacy attached with journal publications. Recently, I have been reflecting on these issues even more since I’ll be in the job market soon. I feel the pressure now of giving in to the whims of the canon to some extent and getting more journal publications under my belt while paradoxically also continuing my academic interrogation of the canon. That being said I hope to continue in my approach of bringing texts into the curriculum that have hitherto been neglected but could possess outlooks to expand the breadth of inquiry in a field. For example, the nineteenth-century courses are generally taught with texts written by canonical English authors like Jane Austen, Dickens, and Charlotte Brontë; however, even though texts such as The History of Mary Prince are so crucial to that time period, the majority of the mainstream nineteenth-century curricula do not include them. So, the question is––why not? I hope to keep on questioning the canon in such a manner in my academic journey.

5) How do you envision informing others about those practices?

Hiranya: Right now, I don’t have a clear idea as to how I would propagate the way I look at texts. There is an organization related to digital humanities and game studies. It’s called the Digital Games Research Association. This is a hub of scholars who do research in games studies and related fields. They have both a central international body and small local and regional chapters. They recently opened the India chapter where we host different talks, engage with different people in the industry who are game designers, and try to foster connections between academics and people in the industry which I think is very important in the humanities nowadays. Additionally, we also have to take another step where we have to effectively reach people who may not directly be interested or be actively engaged with this particular field of study. However, they may be interested in finding out what’s going on. Often resources are gated in some ways and are not very accessible to people who are not in academia directly. So, there needs to be a connecting link between the ideas that we discuss at conferences and how these ideas can be disseminated to a general audience who may not be attending those conferences. I have not yet thought of any particular way of doing this for my field, but I’m sure in the long run I will try finding those ways. And I’m sure other people are also thinking of similar things in this field. And that’s what got me interested in engaging with this scholarly group because the HASTAC Scholars Program is somewhat close to the idea I have where scholars from different fields come together to collaborate in an informal space and engage in conversation.

Nazua: I completely agree! HASTAC is a great platform! What I like best about HASTAC is it’s more informal than other similar scholarly platforms. Here we are focusing more on building a community while using our own individual positionalities and lived experiences to talk about our research and creative activities. I really like this initiative. 

Hiranya: I’ll add another point. I feel like as you go further into academic research, you need people from different fields to come in and challenge your ideas. Most often what happens is that we end up repeatedly interacting with people from within our own fields that leads to the creation of a bubble of people with similar thought patterns. To come out of that bubble, you need someone from outside of that bubble to disrupt your ideas of approaching things. In that way, you get more ideas and more dynamic ways of looking at things that inspire innovation. I feel that HASTAC can help with that.

Nazua: Absolutely! And you know this is how we can practice true interdisciplinarity. It feels less productive when you do your interdisciplinary work only by writing and bringing in theories from different fields. True interdisciplinary work should be like having dialogues among people from different disciplines and creating opportunities where we can engage and influence each other’s research and creative practices. You made a really good point about this!

Hiranya: I agree here with your outlook that as 21st-century scholars, it is our responsibility to break the immediate silos of canonical academic engagement and reach out to communities and groups with the knowledge that has been hitherto gated away from them within the walls of the academic garden that only a select few have access to. Art and Humanities has a potential to influence so many people in varied ways, but generally unlike STEM fields that may have immediate tangible ways in which they channel their influence, our field works its magic in a lot of cases behind the scenes to inform all spheres of human civilization. In my capacity, I would like to increase these strands of Arts and Humanities working behind the scenes so that they reach more and more nooks and crannies, especially the ones that have been challenging to reach in a significant way till this point, and lead to a general consciousness in society that is flexible, varied, and more holistic.

6) Where do you want to see yourself 5-years from now?

Nazua: Hopefully, I’ll be done with my PhD by Summer 2025. If you ask me––I would like to pursue a postdoc position in a program/department that prioritizes Digital Humanities training and offers opportunities for community-engaged work. I have read a lot of scholarly work in Textual Studies and Postcolonial and Decolonial Digital Humanities, worked on digital projects, and have a graduate certificate in Digital Humanities. However, I would like to have more hands-on experience with Digital Humanities tools and methods. So, pursuing a DH-focused postdoc will be my immediate goal after I finish my degree. I will simultaneously look for jobs in academia. If I get a good job offer instead of a postdoc, I would definitely go for the job offer. In terms of a faculty position, I would definitely want to go to a university where I can work in an English department that has a robust Digital Humanities infrastructure and where there is departmental and institutional support available for scholars who are interested in community-engaged work. I am especially interested in reaching out to various stakeholders and doing projects that cater to the needs of different communities beyond the university. For example, here at Washington State University, we have the Centre for Digital Curation and Scholarship (CDSC); CDSC works with Native American communities to digitally preserve their cultural artifcats. So, five years from now, ideally I want to see myself as a researcher in Literary Studies and Digital Humanities who does public-facing and community-engaged work. I would like to combine the skills that I built from my training in literary studies, digital humanities, teacher education, and classroom pedagogy into doing such work and helping others gain those skills and get involved in similar kinds of work. 

You mentioned that you are starting a PhD Program at the National University of Singapore. 

Hiranya: Yeah, I haven’t enrolled in it yet but I have that offer. However, I’m not really sure whether I might take it up. I’m still waiting for their official letter to come in. They mentioned that  they have verified all the required documents and I will get the official letter by May. I think I have till June to decide. So, that’s one possibility. Another possibility could be that I might end up getting some work experience before moving on to a PhD. So, that’s also something I’m considering. Because I’ve been in this university sphere learning and studying continuously for a long time. I really haven’t interacted that much with the outside world and been exposed to the practicalities of the job market and workplace. As you know, unlike other fields, humanities students do not have many internship opportunities. So, as a student, there wasn’t any room for exploration. If I don’t take up that Singapore offer, I might look for some work experience for a year or two. During that time, I’ll be polishing and exploring more into what I actually want to research and how I want to structure my doctoral research proposal. Yeah, I guess that’s the closest I can get to the five-year plan question.

Nazua: Does NUS have a separate game studies or digital humanities department?

Hiranya: I have another offer from Hong Kong which is solely for game studies. The NUS program is called Comparative Asian studies. So my proposal for NUS focuses more on visual narratives in general pertaining to Asia. In addition to games, I incorporated comic studies in my proposal. This program is a space where people from different backgrounds, like sociology, political science, history, law, and literature can come in and do a doctoral degree comparing different regions of Asia from a cultural perspective. On the other hand, the doctoral program in Hong Kong is purely a game studies degree.

7) One of the challenges of Digital Humanities as a field is accessibility and inclusion––how do you approach these challenges?

Nazua: One of the things that I am interested in is the question of accessibility, as we have already talked about, and I shall elaborate more here. Nowadays “Digital Humanities” has become a buzzword, and yet it is true that it still is not accessible to a lot of people. For example, in Bangladesh, my home country, we really don’t have a Digital Humanities department or similar infrastructure yet; but I know that people are interested because people are coming to the US or other countries to study Digital Humanities. It’s really hard when you don’t have the infrastructural support when you go back to implement the degree and implement your knowledge to create those infrastructures. So I think, even though it has become a prominent field it has a long way to go in terms of accessibility and inclusion. For instance, consider low-resource institutions across the globe––it doesn’t matter the geographical location; even if the individuals in such institutions are interested in Digital Humanities, they will need financial and technical resources and training to fully engage with project-based digital humanities research work. 

Hiranya: Yeah. I want to add something. From my personal experience, there are a lot of platforms and journals that a lot of universities don’t have subscriptions to in India and in South Asian countries in general compared to the West. and Western institutions.

My MA program was research-heavy compared to my undergraduate. We had a lot of assignments and the dissertation I was working towards took four semesters in total. So, whenever I needed a resource, I had to find it in various roundabout ways since my university library does not have any direct access to those resources. So that’s a problem even in very reputed universities in India. So this is something, I think, we need to work on. And this is a complicated thing because this has to do with actors who are present within academia and actors who are present outside of academia, like public policy makers.

So I don’t know how me or anyone else working within academia can bring the change alone. However, from a very practical standpoint, if scholars can form groups and share resources amongst each other, we can address this.  For example, if someone needs to access something that requires a monetary investment, others can pull in resources and share with others. Building a collaborative culture like that should be encouraged in academia more if we want to survive in this hyper-competitive field. Such collaborations are crucial to sustain healthy academic competition.

Nazua: Yeah, I totally agree that we need to build more collaborative efforts to address these resource limitations. Particularly, those of us who come from South Asian countries, we still have to do a lot of work on resources. 

8) Tell us about a book/film/video game/TV show or any other text that inspires you.

Nazua: So, I’ll be very honest; I’ve not played a video game ever in my life! But I can talk about a book that really inspired me and I go back to that book again and again as it has shaped the way I think about canon, curriculum, education, and colonial legacies of English education. The book is Masks of Conquest by Gauri Viswanathan’s. In this book, Viswanathan explains in detail the ideologies, practices, and strategies that were implemented when English education was brought to colonial India. It’s so interesting to see, for example, how those ideologies and strategies still persist in the system. The book is so detailed that it almost feels like a history book, while also deeply pedagogical. I really love this book, and it kind of changed my whole idea of what I want to do for my research, and how I want to see myself as a teacher and as a scholar. Apart from that book, I can also touch upon a TV series because I’m really into adaptation studies and frequently delve into different series, especially those based on nineteenth-century literary texts or cultures. One of my favorite series like that is Poldark; it’s set in Cornwall and it centers around a revolutionary, Ross Poldark, who comes from an aristocratic family background and works for the good of the community; the series depicts how Ross gets pushbacks from his family and like people who consider themselves to be above the rest of the populace. The story is set right after the American War of Independence, so yeah, revolving around a lot of political and social changes in the UK at that time, especially in Cornwall. One of the main reasons that I love the series so much, apart from the stellar storyline and characters, is the beautiful landscape of Cornwall that forms the backdrop of the events that occur. The coastal areas in Cornwall is really beautiful! Watching the show also works as a therapy for me because I really love the ocean and am always eager to watch films and TV shows that are filmed in coastal areas.

Hiranya: That’s pretty cool. Masks of Conquest has been on my reading list for a long time. When I read a chapter of this book, I didn’t have time to go through the whole book because I was preparing for my semester exams. I have to go back and read the whole book.

I can talk about this question for an hour, but I won’t do that!

To name a book––a long time ago, I read two books in succession. And it was the period when I was preparing to transition into university after high school. One of them was Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the second one was Bulfinch’s Collection of Greek Mythology. These two books really inspired me to probe deeper into mythology and history and to see literature as a wider field where various fields, like political science, history, mythology, and anthropology intertwine into one amorphous field of inquiry. And that’s not how we were trained in school. In school, we were trained to see various disciplines in a compartmentalized way. We didn’t see various disciplines overlapping and interacting with each other. However, reading those books helped me look at things in a different light and prepared me for my first semester of college.

To name a film––it would be a cliche to mention this film, this film truly inspired me to sustain my inclination to stay in Academia. I’m sure you know about it––it’s Dead Poets Society. I used to think once I grew up and became a professor, I wanted to be like Professor Keating. Even though it was a long time ago, the core spirit behind that film still stayed with me.

To name a videogame===========================059––all my friends know about this game because I can’t stop talking about it whenever I’m around people. And it’s called Skyrim. To boil it down to its basics, it’s basically Beowulf transformed into a game. In this game, the player is the protagonist. One particular aspect of this game is it’s got a lot of quiet moments between the events that happen. There are a lot of places where you can actually go and explore––woods and forests and long roads. You go on this long journey, take your time, drink in the surroundings and so on. It’s very calming and therapeutic in that sense. And playing this game actually helped me see how this medium can be therapeutic. Also, it showed me how it can actually lead you to feel emotions that you feel when you read a good poem or, watch a good film or read a huge novel. When we end a novel, we have this feeling of sinking, not knowing what to do now that the novel ended. I have to read this book again. With that game, for the first time, I had that same feeling. It was before I started university, but it stayed with me. That feeling inspired me to engage with texts in general, look for that sense of feeling, find it, see how it manifests, and critique it. I can go on and name a lot of other texts. But I would limit myself to these.