Rajani Sudan

I began attending the annual SLSA conference as an assistant professor, back in the days when it was SLS. My impression then and now is of a society that fosters innovative scholarship, intellectual rigor, and truly transdisciplinary approaches. I hope to see the society continue to grow from this position, and the recent efforts to not only include but also engage artistic production make me particularly optimistic that it will do so. My work as co-editor of Configurations has made me especially aware of new trends in transdisciplinary scholarship, and our editorial team is constantly working to improve and refine the journal. My own interests are primarily historical, but I don’t believe that history exists merely as a repository for anecdote and chronology, as Thomas Kuhn famously argues in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Rather, my approach is interdisciplinary, sometimes collaborative, but always seeking to identify the anomalies that both establish and break with historical continuum. As such, I am working on the connections between 18th- and 19th-C colonial infrastructure and the language of digital technology. I strongly believe that race, class, gender, and sexuality deeply inform STS, and to that end I want to work to see diversity reflected in the society’s members as well as in its governance.