For nearly 25 years, Anthony Cerulli has been taking pictures of the archives in India that he has worked in, documenting their manuscript collections, architectural designs, and some of the people who manage and maintain them. Over the past decade, he has been exhibiting and publishing some of these photographs in the form of his project “Manuscriptistan.”
Anthony’s interests and efforts as an artist predate his career as an academic. After studying fine art in high school and college, he continued creating art through much of graduate school. Although academic research became his main focus, artistic expression has been a parallel theme in Anthony’s career. In his own words, “I have viewed my academic activities through lenses I crafted in the arts.” In May 2026, Anthony gave a talk at the MPIWG about his Manuscriptistan Project.
The project’s title “Manuscript–i–stan” adds the Persian suffix –stān (cognate of Sanskrit sthāna), meaning “place of” or “land of” to the word “manuscript.” The name is an attempt to evoke the millennia of handwritten knowledge production, transmission, and preservation in South Asia. Spotlighting the textures, lighting, colors, and compositions of archival spaces and their collections as well as archival cultures, each photo crystallizes a particular place and time in Anthony’s research. He conceives of Manuscriptistan as both an aesthetic and an ethnographic project, and his goal is to provide “ethnographic accounts of some of the people involved in the kind of text-based research [he has] done in India over the years, e.g., librarians and preservationists; professors and students; office administrators; donors; politicians; janitors; and security guards […] without all of these people, my work (and the work of many others) would not be possible.” Manuscriptistan prompted a fundamental awareness that shapes how Anthony thinks about philology: namely, that texts and archives are variable social constructions.
As Artist-in-Residence, Anthony pursued new ways of developing the Manuscriptistan project, which included inquiries that will lead to an art book publication with a Berlin publisher and connections to the international art scene in Berlin. Anthony says “this artist residency gave me an opportunity I rarely get: time to reflect intentionally about how my expressions in visual art and academic research inform each other and shape my professional activity.”
Anthony's project was developed through collaboration with members of ASTRA and Dept. AAK
Manuscriptan 63. Source: Photograph by author