Principal Investigators
Sneha Krishnan
Sneha Krishnan is Associate Professor in Human Geography at the University of Oxford. She is interested in how histories of colonialism and imperial afterlives shape the experience of girlhood. She is currently writing a book about women’s hostels in Southern India, and has ongoing projects on childhood and geopolitics, as well as on death and suicide in South Asia.
Megan Eaton Robb
Megan Eaton Robb is the Julie and Martin Franklin Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her first book Print and the Urdu Public was published in 2021 with Oxford University Press. It focuses on lithographed newspapers’ role in facilitating ties between the Urdu language and Muslim identity in the early twentieth century.
Undergraduate Research Assistants
Juliana Lu
Juliana Lu is a rising sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania studying cognitive science and computer science. She is interested in digital humanities, web development, and the intersection between technology and the arts.
Michael Goerlitz
Michael Goerlitz is a rising third-year studying History & Economics. He’s very interested in archival research and South Asian history.
Staff Members
Hallie Nell Swanson
Hallie Nell Swanson works as a Persian translator, archival researcher, and a DH Specialist on staff. is a third-year PhD student in Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, specialising in Islam in early modern South Asia. She is interested in relationships between Indo-Persian literary culture, education, and ethics, particularly approached through the circulation of Persian manuscripts.
Seyed Ali Noori
Ali Noori is the Lead Persian Translator and a DH specialist on staff. He received his Bachelor’s in Philosophy and Near Eastern Intellectual History from the CUNY Baccalaureate program for Unique and Interdisciplinary Studies, where his focus was early Islamic philosophy and the evolving authority of Greek philosophers therein. His thesis was titled: “Ibn Sīnā’s Adaptation of Aristotle’s Active Intellect: Paving the Way for Philosophical Sufism.”
Max Johnson Dugan
Max supports Unstable Archives as Lead Designer and DH Specialist. Max is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on Islamic materiality in the digital age, especially in North America. Max’s dissertation examines contemporary Halal consumption in Philadelphia and Islamic tattooing discourse on social media to understand how things come to feel authentically Islamic.
Munazza Ebtikar
Munazza Ebtikar is an archival researcher on staff. PhD Candidate in the University of Oxford. Her doctoral thesis lies between History and Anthropology with a focus on Afghanistan.
Advisors
Arthur Mitchell Fraas
Curator, Special Collections, University of Pennsylvania Libraries
Judith Siefring
Head of Digital Research, Bodleian Libraries
Unstable Archives 