I am editor of a book of essays under the title One-Track Mind: Technology, Capitalism, and the Art of the Pop Song, which was published in the Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series by Routledge. With contributions from Austin McCoy, Simon Reynolds, Oliver Wang, Gina Arnold, and many others, the book convenes a diverse gathering of scholars and journalists to write in-depth essays about a single song as a way to explore the history of popular culture in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. More information about the book and ordering details can be found here. Find the Introduction to the book here.

I edited a special issue of History and Technology (Vol. 31, no. 4 in 2015) on the theme of “Technology in the South Asian Imaginary.” The issue brought together a number of leading scholars to bear on the problematics of the history of science and technology in South Asia. In a special introduction, I lay out the historiographical stakes of this intervention, that acts as both a survey of the field of the history of science, technology, and medicine in South Asia, and also suggests some possible new frames of research. The issue includes five original full-length essays focusing on: female sexuality in colonial Bengal; the history of the profiloscope in the context of racial discourses in colonial India; the place of independent India in the history of the neoliberal order; the instrumental use of geography to create the Indian space program; and a case study on the role of laptops as avatars of modernity in post-liberalization India.

I was co-editor of a special issue of the journal Continuity and Change on “Bureaucratic secrecy and the regulation of knowledge in Europe over the longue durée.” The issue (Vol. 38, no. 1) brought together four essays (plus an afterword by Michael Gordin) that explored how normative bureaucratic practices of secrecy manifested at different points in European history through instruments of obfuscation, omission, performance, and policing. The collection as a whole intervenes into discussions of the production, circulation, and control of knowledge in “ordinary” contexts in European history. For more information, see here.

I co-edited (along with Dr. Robyn d’Avignon and Dr. Betty Banks) a special themed section of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (Vol. 41, no. 1 in 2021) on the topic of “An African-Soviet Modern.” The section brought together four essays on specific Cold War entanglements on the African continent between Soviet and African actors. In introducing the concept of an “African-Soviet Modern,” we have conceptualized an often-asymmetrical mobilization of aspiration, material outcome, and practice that was located not only in diverse African sites and in the Soviet Union, but in an expanded global geography sculpted through mobility, ideological alliances, and transnational infrastructure.

I was co-editor of a volume of essays under the title Into the Cosmos: Space Exploration and Soviet Culture published by the University of Pittsburgh Press (as part of their Series in Russian and East European Studies) in 2011. The book collects a diverse set of essays focusing on the cultural dimensions of Soviet exploration in the 1950s and 1960s, a time when popular enthusiasm for cosmic exploration represented a powerful measure of the hopes of post-Stalinist society. Through interrogations of the connections between the material and the symbolic elements of the Soviet space program—associations operating at the individual, community, and national levels—the contributors to this volume offer fresh insight into an unexplored element of Soviet history, the triangular relationship between science, state, and culture in the postwar era. More information on the book can be found here.