Raja Adal
Raja Adal is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and the Director of its World History Center at the University of Pittsburgh. He is a historian of technology, empire, aesthetics, and the materiality of writing whose work has explored global connections and comparisons, using archives in Japanese, Arabic, French German, and Turkish, as well as global and local datasets. Adal is currently writing a book manuscript about global scripts and the instruments for writing them from the brush to the typewriter to Unicode. As part of this project, he has co-edited (with Christopher Lowy) a special issue of the Journal of Asian Studies entitled “Unicode and the Humanities,” which is scheduled to appear in October 2026. This issue includes his article “Big Tech, the Big State, and the Battle for Encoding all of the World's Languages.” His research on writing systems, typewriters, and Unicode is also appearing in a forthcoming chapter on “Technology and the Savior Myth of Sinographs,” in the Cambridge History of Technology.
University of Pittsburgh
Session
In 2000, Mike Davis published the now classic work, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. The book’s main argument, that colonial policies exacerbated the effects of global climate patterns and led to the excess death of millions of people in late nineteenth century famines, stirred debate and ultimately led to the reassessment of colonialism’s lasting impact on the Global South. Ruth Mostern, Raja Adal (University of Pittsburgh ), Nadin Heé, Daniel Hedinger (Leipzig University), and Shellen Wu (Lehigh University) will conduct a roundtable panel on the use of AI to read nineteenth century large-scale weather data and archival materials at scale to reexamine the famines that arose from the 1877 El Niño. We would like to revisit Mike Davis’ arguments in Victorian Holocaust with empirical evidence that new technological developments now make possible. Focusing on a crucial period in the late nineteenth century - for the rise of meteorological sciences, instrumentation, and global networks for the collection of data, we will share strategies, methodologies, and tools for using AI and other digital tools for large scale historical research. This panel brings together a range of fields that are rarely articulated at once: world history and the history of empire, environmental history, the history of science and technology, and digital methods for history.