Contact: nc8@hawaii.edu
Office hours:SPRING 2026: Tuesdays: 1:00- 4:00 @ 416 MOORE HALL & Wednesdays, 2:00-4:00 pm @Kuy 714
My research and teaching are concerned with the literary and non-literary forms of labor, pleasure, and idleness. I teach a variety of courses on the theory of forms, medium, and genres. I am the current Director of the Center for South Asian Studies. I am also in the process of completing two manuscripts on late modernism in Hindi literature namely Superfluous Life: Vinod Kumar Shukla’s Surplus Population and Literary Lumpens: 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,” eds. Lena Henningsen, Sandra Kurfürst,
and Stephan Packard, Popular Visual Media Beyond ‘the West’. [Forthcoming in 2025]
‘'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, Psychoanalysis, Literary Modernism, Gender and Sexuality, 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
Spring Semester 2026
- ENG-271: Introduction to Literature: Genre
- ENG-775: Seminar in Cultural Studies: The Creative Uses of Waste: The Essay-Film and Other Recyclings
Spring Semester 2025
- ENG-311: Autobiographical Writing
- ENG-775: Seminar in Cultural Studies: From Trashy to Literary Heterotopias: A History of the Form and Function of Comics
Fall Semester 2024
- ENG-321: Backgrounds of Western Literature
- ENG-440: Single Author: Patricia Highsmith
Fall Semester 2025
- ENG-321: Backgrounds of Western Literature