I work on postcolonial and world literatures, and anglophone novel studies. My latest publication is a two-volume The Cambridge History of World Literature (2021). I am series editor (with Francesca Orsini) of the Cambridge book series Cambridge Studies in World Literature.

 

My monograph, This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form (2016) traces the interlaced histories of globalism, information technology, ethnic violence, and humanitarian connectivity as these have shaped the contemporary anglophone novel. I am currently completing a monograph entitled Catastrophic Modes and Planetary Realism. The book conceives catastrophe in the language of existential risk rather than as an end-of-the-world occurrence. Literary and cinematic works on four iconic contemporary scenarios of catastrophe feature in this study: drone warfare, viral pandemics, nuclear accidents, and climate change. I explore the changing aesthetics of realism in a planetary realm and the ontological upending of the realist novel’s humanist ground by mega-scale nonhuman forces.

 

My first monograph, Caste, Colonialism, and Counter-Modernity (2005), is an intellectual history and a revisionist ethnography of caste and untouchability in India from the point of view of theoretical developments in the field of postcolonial studies. Spanning a period from the eighteenth century to the present, the book traces the discursive horizons of caste from early colonial histories and anthropological tracts to contemporary dalit literature and postcolonial historiographical projects such as Subaltern Studies.

 

As director of humanities institutes in two countries over a decade and a half, I have extensive experience in fostering international projects and networks in the fields of environmental humanities, digital humanities, human rights and refugee migration, and global south studies. From 2017-2021, I led a Lab, Humanities Informatics, 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.

 

I have held visiting fellowships at the University of Chicago, University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, and University of Wisconsin-Madison. I am a Fellow and Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge, Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, and advisory board member of the Harvard Institute for World Literature, the Academy of Global Humanities and Critical Theory (Bologna), the Interdisciplinary Centre for Global South Studies (Tübingen) and the Centre in Culture, Language, and Communication (Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University).

 

‘Angloglobalism, Multilingualism, and World Literature, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Vol.24, No.8, 2022

 

‘The Scale of Realism in the Global Novel,’ Global Literary Studies: Key Concepts, eds Diana Roag Sanchez and Neus Rotger, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022,

 

‘The Speculative Turn in Feminist World Literature’, Feminism and World Literature, editor Robin Goodman, London: Bloomsbury, 2022