Nandini Chandra

Contact:
nc8@hawaii.edu

Office hours:
Tuesday 3-4


At UH, I mostly 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. The first one is entitled The Poetics of the Surplus Population: The Novels of Vinod Kumar Shukla and the Contradictions of Hindi Modernism. The other is a collection of essays on the history of comics and graphic novels in South Asia. This will be something of a sequel to my first book: The Classic Popular: Amar Chitra Katha 1967-2007 (Yoda Press, 2008).


Publications


Book
  • The Classic Popular: Amar Chitra Katha (1967 to 2007), Yoda Press, New Delhi, 2008.
Selected Essays and Book Chapters
  • “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 Blackswan, 2016.
  • “Transitional Selves and the Question of Class Consciousness”, Trans-Humanities, Vol. 7, No.1, Feb 2014.
  • “The Prehistory of Superhero Comics in India”, Thesis Eleven, No. 113, December 2012.
  • “The Amar Chitra Katha Shakuntala: Pin-up or Role Model”, Samaj: South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, Special Issue: Modern Achievers: Role Models in South Asia. Volume 4, December 2010.
  • “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


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 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

Fall Semester 2021
  • ENG-365: Fiction
  • ENG-625B/E: Theories and Methods of Literary Studies