Karthik is a PhD student from Chennai. His planned PhD project foregrounds the rewriting of bodily and sexual coherence under the climate crisis in South Asia. His fields of interest include queer and trans theory, environmental humanities, postcolonial studies and South Asian studies. He was a department sponsored candidate for the 2024 session of the Cornell School of Criticism and Theory and will be a department sponsored candidate for the 2025 session of the Institute for World Literature at Harvard.
 

Before joining UVA, Karthik was a Chevening scholar for the year 2020-2021 at SOAS where he studied for a master’s in comparative literature and graduated with distinction. His dissertation analyzed trans corporeality in Indian Anglophone fiction. A portion of this thesis was published as "Spectral Trans Figures: The Ambiguous and Atemporal Hijra Body in Narcopolis" in Wasafiri. It was awarded the 2023 Wasafiri Essay Prize.

 

Karthik has previously worked as a writing instructor and teaching assistant with the English department at Ashoka University, Delhi. He was part of the inaugural team that helped set up the JCB Prize for Literature, India’s richest literary award. He has also worked as an independent journalist for a variety of publications and been the recipient of a number of awards including the Likho Award for Excellence in Media from Humsafar Trust and the Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation’s Young Writer’s Grant. 

 

2024. "Spectral Trans Figures: The Ambiguous and Atemporal Hijra Body in Narcopolis". Wasafiri.  https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/metrics/10.1080/02690055.2024.2277050