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Contribution long abstract

I am interested in your project because of the joy I experience when reading. I want to know how others read and meditate on reading as a process.

I am currently turning my dissertation into a book. I write on the intersection of imperial legislation and riparian landscape in eighteenth and nineteenth century Bengal. Such research entails paging through thousands of handwritten letters produced by the writers of the East India Company (EIC) in their spidery copperplate.

I initially found this reading tedious, particularly because when I read fiction, I see the scene unfolding in my mind’s eye and have a tendency to read faster when the action of the plot necessitates it. When reading my primary sources it took time—over a year in fact—to create a visual life-world inhabited by the writers of these EIC letters and their imperial subjects.

On my most recent trip to West Bengal I visited rice paddies and riverbanks not to gather any particular data but to imbibe a sense of the place that now enriches what I see when I read.