The Agha Shahid Ali Archive

Collection Description

The Beloved Witness project is a Mellon-funded digital archive of the video-taped readings, personal documents, letters, and manuscripts of Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001). New technologies will organize, display and allow interaction with the archive from multiple formats and devices, including materials for mobile devices. Our aim is to show how technology might be used to reveal what is unique in a poet's oeuvre and how teaching and literary scholarship in a digital environment allow a new globalized approach to poetry and culture. Ali's life and work offer an exemplary model for humanists to bear "witness" to a world of lost tribes, of political and ethnic conflicts, of the pain of exile and of the possibility for transformation and reconciliation.

The archive is a collaborative effort which will expand through contributions of letters, documents, critical perspectives and creative responses from colleagues, friends and readers of Shahid's works. One of the goals of the archive is to assemble an advisory committee to help identify ways of building a community of Shahid's readers in South Asia and around the world.


Principal Investigators

Patricia O'Neill, Ph.D.
Professor of English and Creative Writing
poneill@hamilton.edu

Hena Ahmad, Ph.D.
Professor of English, Truman State University
hahmad@truman.edu


Material Donors

Iqbal Agha Ali, Ph.D.
Professor of Operations Management; Department Chairman
Isenberg School of Management

Hena Ahmad, Ph.D.
Professor of English, Truman State University


DHi Co-Directors

Angel David Nieves, Ph.D.
Co-Director, Digital Humanities Initiative, Hamilton College
anieves@hamilton.edu

Janet Thomas Simons, M.S.
Co-Director, Digital Humanities Initiative, Hamilton College
jsimons@hamilton.edu


DHi Collection Development Team

Gregory Lord
Lead Designer & Software Engineer, Digital Humanities Initiative, Hamilton College
glord@hamilton.edu

Peter MacDonald
Library Information Systems Specialist, Hamilton College
pmacdona@hamilton.edu

Lisa McFall
Metadata and Catalog Librarian, Hamilton College
lmcfall@hamilton.edu

Steve Young
ITS Network Services Unix/HPC System Administrator, Hamilton College
slyoung@hamilton.edu