Academic Background

I came at Sanskrit through personal interests midway through college. Buddhist meditation and books like the Bhagavad Gita got me curious about the languages and knowledge systems behind them. I was officially studying Environmental Science and Public Policy, but my elective classes, including one on Mādhyamaka philosophy, ultimately proved to be more interesting. After college, at the end of a long trip of soul-searching by bicycle, I settled in Ithaca, NY, took a part-time job as a cashier at an organic food co-op, and started auditing Sanskrit classes at Cornell.

I would say within weeks, I was so taken by Sanskrit, I knew I wanted to share it with others. I was skeptical about returning officially to academia, but I wanted a rigorous education in the subject, so, within a few years, I took the plunge again, back into Harvard. It was… not great for me. On the one hand, I loved all the language courses I was able to take. My home library today creaks under the weight of those years. And as I dreamed I might, I loved teaching Sanskrit to students. But the research side of things turned out to be miserable for me. I cared about teaching and the materials of pedagogy, including dictionaries and grammars. Aside from those, the traditional research output I most wanted to produce, if anything, was a new edition of a text, a new translation, or even a new digital resource (I had really liked computer programming once upon a time as a high schooler). At Harvard, though, I was steered toward topics that were more theoretical and thereby strategically better for getting an academic job in the States. It didn’t feel right for me. And when I let myself learn a bit of Python and really liked it, it confirmed my suspicion: I was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

With the help of a couple of lucky clues from the universe, I made a big jump from Massachusetts to Germany. After a transitional year or so, including a semester studying Indo-European in Munich, I found a good opportunity to start a new Sanskrit PhD, complete with half-time employment as part of a digital philology project team, in Leipzig. It was exactly the change I needed. This team of senior Sanskritists patiently welcomed me to the seminar table as a respected colleague, appreciated my contributions, and motivated me to level up my computer skills across the board. Plus, a vibrant and diverse group of digital-humanities scholars were camped out in Leipzig for those same years, trading techniques and inspiration across pre-modern language domains as different as Greek, Hebrew, Persian, Chinese, and more. I was the oddball Sanskritist in the group, and it felt great. With ample freedom to steer my doctoral research, I pursued a peculiar combination of not only Sanskrit philology and philosophy — culminating in a critical edition, translation, and analysis of a part of the 10th-century Nyāyabhūṣaṇa — but also digital humanities. Specifically, I came up with a corpus-based system (Pramāṇa NLP and Vātāyana) that reveals intertextual connections between Sanskrit philosophy texts relevant to my philology work. It may not be the most technically sophisticated project out there, but it motivated me to educate myself, and it helped me to finally experience what it’s like to do research that feels authentic, concrete, and exciting to share with the academic community.

That’s still what I’m after, even if I’m no longer full-time in the field. Nowadays, post-PhD, I’m a father, and, by some miracle, I have good work as a software engineer for a small-ish biotech company. When I have downtime, I still think about Sanskrit, and philosophy, and philology, and the role digital tools have to play. Even when I sit down to meditate, it’s inevitably where my mind goes. After a few years of this, I got to feeling like I’m not a “good meditator” anymore. But then at some point I realized: After all these years, my complex relationship with digital Sanskrit philology is part of my practice. And all things considered, it’s a beautiful thing. So, I’m here to share that. For those who want Sanskrit language study to be a part of their own journey, I think knowing a thing or two about digital resources is a good thing, and I’m happy to be here talking about it.

If any part of this mission speaks to you, I hope you’ll stay tuned and be in touch!