Another area of work in this project focuses on South Asian birch bark books in codex format from roughly the 15th century and later, especially those written in Śāradā script, following on from our previous collaboration with Anne Peale (Williams College), Bexx Caswell-Olson  (Northeast Document Conservation Center) and Mary Hamilton French (formerly Northeast Document Conservation Center, now Boston Public Library), Andrew Nelson (Western University), Sloane Geddes (University of Toronto), and Greg Lin (Harvard University’s Center for Nanoscale Systems) in work on a recently-discovered Śāradā manuscript now housed at Williams College. (That manuscript has now been digitized and is available here.)

We will soon be able to share updates in this research area, which include a coming collaboration with archaeologist Dr. Muhammad Hameed (University of the Punjab) as a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, and work led by Sloane Geddes to improve methods to re-contextualize unidentified and understudied Śāradā manuscripts based on their textual and material evidence.