Contact: nc8@hawaii.edu
Office hours:Monday and Friday: 3:30-4:30 pm
I teach genre-based courses on popular culture and literature to sophomores, as well as foundational, theory based-classes for graduate students and advanced undergraduates, using pop-culture to teach theory and theory to understand popular forms and everyday life. I am currently in the process of completing two manuscripts: Superfluous Life:Vinod Kumar Shukla’s Surplus Population and Literary Lumpens: Lumpenism and Lumpen-Aesthetics in North India.
Publications
Book
The Classic Popular: Amar Chitra Katha (1967 to 2007), Yoda Press, New Delhi, 2008.
Guest Editor. Special Issue entitled ‘Infantile Crisis: Youth in Contemporary South Asian Film and Media.’ Studies in South Asian Film and Media. Volume 11, No. 1, 2019-2020.
Selected Essays and Book Chapters
“A Non-Literary History of Indian Comics,” ed. Stephen Packard. German Handbook of Comic Studies. de Gruyter. [Forthcoming in 2023]
‘'Pakodas, jugad and the vernacular fetish: Youth subcultures in late neo-liberal India’, South Asian Film and Media. Vol. 11, No. 1, November 2020.
“The Fear of Iconoclasm: Genre and Media Transformations from Comics to Graphic Novels in Amar Chitra Katha, Bhimayana, and Munnu”, South Asian Review, November 2018.
“The Surplus University”, ed. Debaditya Bhattacharya, The Idea of the University: Histories and Contexts, Routledge India, September 2018
“Lumpen”, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Special Issue: English Keywords for Modern India, 19 June 2017.
“Childspeak: Children’s Periodicals in Colonial North India (1920-50)”, ed. Swapan Chakravarty and Abhijit Gupta, Founts of Knowledge: Book History in India, Orient Black-swan, 2016.
“The Prehistory of Superhero Comics in India”, Thesis Eleven, No. 113, December 2012.
“Young Protest: The Idea of Merit in Popular Hindi Cinema”, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, 30:1, May 2010.
“Travel Writing as Nationalist Pedagogy in the Hindi Children’s Periodicals (1920-50)”, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2, August 2007.
Areas of Interest
Marxism, Critical Theory, Popular Culture, Literary Modernism, Gender Studies, Comics and Graphic Novels, Childhood Studies, South Asian Film and Literature
Education
- PhD, Centre for Linguistics & English, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, 2002;
- MPhil English, JNU, 1996;
- MA English, JNU, 1994;
- BA English, Fergusson College, University of Poona, Pune, 1992.
Courses
Fall Semester 2024
- ENG-321: Backgrounds of Western Lit
- ENG-440: Single Author: Patricia Highsmith
Fall Semester 2023
- ENG-271: Introduction to Literature: Genre
- ENG-775: Seminar in Cultural Studies: Work of Love
Spring Semester 2023
- ENG-311: Autobiographical Writing
- ENG-335: British Literature After 1900
Fall Semester 2022
- ENG-321: Backgrounds of Western Literature
- ENG-775: Seminar in Cultural Studies: Narratives of Natal Separation: the Camp, Bare Life, and British Child Psychoanalysis