Debjani Ganguly

Debjani Ganguly specializes in post-1945 English and global anglophone literatures. Her research is informed by postcolonial and world literary theories, media ecologies, philosophies of technology, human rights discourse, and environmental concerns. She is the author of This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form (Duke 2016) and Caste, Colonialism and Counter-Modernity (Routledge 2005), and the editor of the two-volume The Cambridge History of World Literature (2021). Her latest monograph, Catastrophic Modes and Planetary Realism, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. She is the general editor with Francesca Orsini of the monograph series, Cambridge Studies in World Literature.

Currently, Debjani also serves as Director of Harvard’s Institute for World Literature. She has held visiting fellowships at the University of Chicago, University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of Bologna. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, Fellow and Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge, and Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. Throughout her career, she has served on advisory boards and committees of several universities such as Brown, Bologna, Cornell, Harvard, Tubingen, Trinity College Dublin, and professional organizations such as the American Academy of Berlin, the Modern Languages Association, the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, and the International Comparative Literature Association.

As director of humanities institutes at the University of Virginia (2016-2023) and the Australian National University (2007-2014), Debjani Ganguly has fostered international projects and networks in the fields of environmental humanities, digital humanities, informatics, big data, and AI, human rights and refugee migration, oceanic studies, premodern global cultures, and world literatures. From 2017-2021, she led a Lab on Humanities Informatics at the IHGC in Virginia with an interdisciplinary team of computer scientists, data scientists, media scholars, sociologists, philosophers, literary theorists, legal scholars, ethicists, and historians of science and technology. The Lab explored epistemological and ethical questions about contemporary infrastructures of information - social media, big data, algorithms, AI - that shape knowledge and

values in society. Prior to her appointment at the University of Virginia, she directed the Humanities Research Centre (HRC) at ANU, Canberra. Debjani completed her doctoral work at ANU in 2002 and served as tenured faculty in ANU's School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics until 2015. In 2025 she was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities.

• 2025, “The Worlding of World Literature,” Oxford Handbook on Cosmopolitanisms, eds. Prathama Banerjee, et.al, Oxford University Press.
• 2025, “World Literature and Global Anglophone Comparativism,” Routledge Companion to Global Comparative Literature, editors Omid Azadibougar and Zhang Longxi, London: Routledge.
• 2024, “Drone Form and Techno-Futurities,” New Literary History, Vol. 54, No. 4, 2024
• 2024, "The Aesthetics of Global Realism," Literature and the Question of the Universal, ed. Stefan Helgesson et. al, Berlin: De Gruyter. 
• 2023, “Decolonizing World Literature,” Decolonizing the English Literary Curriculum, ed. Ato Quayson and Ankhi Mukherjee, Cambridge University Press. 
• 2023, “Angloglobalism, Multilingualism, and World Literature”, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, vol.25, no.5, pp 601-618. 
• 2023, “War and Drones,” War and Literary Studies, eds. Anders Engberg-Peterson and Neil Ramsay, Cambridge University Press, pp 261-277 
• 2022, “The Scale of Realism in the Global Novel,” Global Literary Studies: Key Concepts, eds Diana Riog Sanchez and Neus Rotger, Berlin: De Gruyter, pp137-160 
• 2022, “The Speculative Turn in Feminist World Literature,” Feminism and World Literature, ed. Robin Goodman, London: Bloomsbury, pp 56.70 
• 2021, “Oceanic Comparativism and World Literature,” The Cambridge History of World Literature, Cambridge University Press, pp 429-457 
• 2020, “Catastrophic Form and Planetary Realism,” New Literary History, Vol.51, No.2, pp 419-453 
• 2020, “The Global Novel: Comparative Perspectives,” New Literary History, Vol.51, No.2. pp v-xviii 
• 2020, “Salman Rushdie and the World Picture of Islam”, The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to World Literature, Oxford: Blackwell. Volume 5: eds. B. Venkat Mani and Ken Seigneurie, pp 1-11 
• 2019, “Opium and Indian Ocean Worlds: The Scale of the Historical Novel in Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy”, MLA Volume on Amitav Ghosh, ed. Gaurav Desai and John Stratton, Modern Languages Association, pp 26-37  
• 2017, “Humanitarian Scripts in the World Novel”, Worldmaking: Literature, Language, Culture, ed. Philippa Kelly, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.  
• 2015, “The Value of Worldmaking in Global Literary Studies”, The Values of Literary Studies, ed. Ronan McDonald, Cambridge University Press, pp 204-219 
• 2015, “Postcolonialism’s Afterlife: The Novel after 1989”, The Cambridge Companion to the Postcolonial Novel, ed. Ato Quayson, Cambridge University Press, pp 35-59. 
• 2015, “Polysystems Redux: The Unfinished Business of World Literature,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, Vol.2, No.2, pp 272-281 
• 2014, “The World Novel, Mediated Wars, and Exorbitant Witnessing,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 1:1, pp11-31 
• 2014, “New Topographies of the Postcolonial’, with Ato Quayson and Neil Ten Kortenaar, Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 1:1, pp 1-10 
• 2012, ‘Dalit Life-Stories’, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Indian Culture, ed. Vasudha Dalmia, Cambridge University Press, pp 142-162 
• 2012, “The Language Question in India”, The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature, ed. Ato Quayson, Cambridge University Press, pp 649-702 
• 2011, ‘Deathworlds, The World Novel and the Human’, Angelaki, Vol. 16, No. 4, pp 145-158 
• 2010' ‘Postcolonial Poetry in English,’ Modern Philology, Vol. 107, No. 3, pp E75-E78 
• 2009' ‘Pain, Personhood, and the Collective: Dalit Lifestories’, Asian Studies Review, Vol. 43, No. 4 pp 429-442 
• 2008' ‘Literary Globalism in the New Millennium’, Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1, pp 119-133 
• 2008' ‘Tryst with Postcolonial Destiny’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vo. 43, No.7, 16 February, pp 35-38. 
• 2008' ‘Global Literary Refractions: Reading Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters’, English Academy Review, Vol. 25, No. 1 June, pp 249-264 
• 2007, “100 Days in Rwanda: Trauma Aesthetics and Humanist Ethics in an Age of Terror”, Humanities Research, Vol. 15, No.2, pp 49-65 
• 2007, “From Empire to Empire: Writing the Transnational Anglo-Indian Self in Australia”, Journal of Intercultural Studies, Vol. 28, No 1, pp 27-40 
• 2004, “Buddha, Bhakti and Superstition: A Post-Secular Reading of Dalit Conversion”, Postcolonial Studies, April 2004, Vol. 7, No.1, pp 49-62