The Department of Liberal Arts, IIT Bhilai organized an invited lecture by Dr Maya Dodd,
FLAME University, under the aegis of Intersections Lecture series on 15 September 2025. In
the lecture titled “Locating a New Historiography for India: Digital Archives and Public
History” held in the campus, Dr Dodd talked about the significance of the emerging field of
Digital Humanities in India with particular focus on public history in an age of rapid digital
advancements. The lecture highlighted the need to locate new voices across archives in India
and the critical role of digital relay in community knowledge archival in order for the
inclusion of marginal voices in mainstream historical archives.
The lecture engaged with the importance of understanding the implications of the digital turn
and how it enabled the archives to move beyond physical repositories and to become more
people centric to not only engage with the past but to actively reconstruct it. By emphasising
the seminal role and immense potential of digital archiving the lecture underscored the need
to create alternate forms of community archiving anchored by digital tools. Dr Dodd
concluded the lecture by recalling the pertinent role of decolonising modes of knowledge
production, amplifying sources for a new historiography, and the creation of community
archives in unleashing new remembrance.
Intersections lecture series organised by the Department of Liberal Arts is a multidisciplinary
platform for open discussion and examination of the liberal arts and their pedagogies,
methodologies, and trajectories. The forum aims to re-centre the reflective, thinking spirit in
contemporary social and scholarly life and features invited lectures by eminent professors in
various domains in humanities and social sciences.
