Ammel is Project Director and Lead Archivist at the Queer Archive for Memory, Reflection and Activism (QAMRA) at NLSIU. She is also a PhD candidate in History at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. Her dissertation is titled Literature as Recovery: The Public Life of Text Criticism in Kannada.
At QAMRA, she brings her interests in history and higher education to the queer archive at NLSIU. She supervises archival processes including acquisition, documentation and digitization of the collections. Her priorities are to deepen QAMRA’s presence among queer individuals and communities in India, as well as on the NLSIU campus among faculty members, library staff and students through events and collaborations, to foster exchange with academic and archival institutions, fundraise to ensure stability crucial for the continuity of QAMRA’s plans, and work towards community-focused public engagement and research publications.
With RVS Sundaram, she has translated an eleventh century Kannada poem, Gadāyuddham, as The Duel of the Maces (Manohar 2018, Routledge 2020) and a tenth century Kannada treatise, Chandombudhi, as The Ocean of Prosody (Central University of Karnataka 2020). Recently, she co-authored an open-access info-booklet on pollinators, Native Bees and Pollination in the Puducherry Bioregion (IFP 2022). Her forthcoming publications include an article on Kannada typography for the Book History in India series Vol. 4 (Orient Blackswan), and an essay on abstinence for an anthology on South Asian friendships (Yoda Press). Some of her collaborative work can be found on www.understory.in
QAMRA Archive is now temporarily housed at the Centre for Child and Law, first floor of the Old Academic Block, until the Library redevelopment is complete.