/about

வணக்கம் (vanakkam: welcome)! I’m visforvali (she/her). I’m an Eelam Tamil American chronically ill writer, scholar, artist, and designer. My work is interdisciplinary, multimodal, transgenre, and open access, emphasizing the culturally specific nature of chronic pain and fatigue while using anomalously embodied composition to enact it. I’m currently an Assistant Professor in the Dept. of English, Writing, and Cultural Studies at Pace University – Pleasantville (PLV) and director of the PLV Writing-Enhanced Course (WEC) program. I received my Ph.D. in Communication, Information, and Media from Rutgers University and my M.F.A. in Creative Writing – Fiction from Columbia University.

/this site

I find myself increasingly self-hosting work that publication forums don’t have space for and wanting to preview WIPs prior to publication. This site was created to consolidate links to these texts. Here you can find excerpts of my webtext dissertation (the first digital dissertation at Rutgers School of Communication and Information), most of my published and WIP games, interactive fiction developed for specific classes, and other kinds of multimodal, interactive content.

This site was revised in the wake of Mullivaikkal remembrance and during a massive flare of chronic pain and fatigue: I struggled to process words and code; couldn’t rely on vision, finger dexterity, or the ability to be upright; and had little patience for the vagaries of my bodymind, let alone my mistakes. I have intentionally retained some of my resulting inelegant workarounds and paranoiacally high number of commits to highlight the ways that technologies and diasporic-disabled bodyminds malfunction — my dynamic way of being and knowing that is only intermittently legitimate in the clinic and academy.

This site uses Jekyll. The core files for this site were created and shared by b2a3e8 © 2018 under MIT License and modified by visforvali. The typeface is Colophon Foundry’s Space Mono. All content is licensed by me © under CC-BY-NC-SA.