Speakers
Prof. Pramod K. Nayar
Prof. Pramod K Nayar, the UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies, is a Professor in the Department of English. He has published on Human Rights and Literary-Cultural Studies, Posthumanism, Graphic Novels, and English writings on India. His books have appeared from Polity, Cambridge University Press, Bloomsbury, Routledge, Palgrave-Macmillan, Lexington, De Gruyter, Rowman and Littlefield, Penguin and Orient BlackSwan. Among these are Bhopal’s Ecological Gothic: Disaster, Precarity and the Biopolitical Uncanny, Human Rights and Literature, Writing Wrongs: The Cultural Construction of Human Rights in India, Ecoprecarity: Vulnerable Lives in Literature and Culture, The Extreme in Contemporary Culture, The Human Rights Graphic Novel: Drawing it Just Right, Alzheimer’s Disease Memoirs: Poetics of the Forgetting Self, Nuclear Cultures: Irradiated Subjects, Aesthetics and Planetary Precarity. Besides essays in numerous anthologies worldwide, he has also published in Modern Fiction Studies, Narrative, Postcolonial Studies, Postcolonial Text, Celebrity Studies, Ariel, Kunapipi, Changing English, Orbis Litterarum and other journals. He has received the Visitor’s Award for Best Research in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (2018) from the President of India and has been recently (2022) elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He teaches elective courses in The New Humanities, Human Rights Cultures and Vulnerability Studies in the Department of English. He is also the Co-Principal Investigator of the world’s first OER for Indian Writing in English.
Prof. Anna Kurian
Prof. Anna Kurian, Faculty Fellow, is a Professor in the Department of English specializing in Shakespeare and the Early Modern, Children’s and Young Adult Literature and cultural politics. Her work has appeared in Radical Teacher, Shakespeare in Southern Africa, Scene, ANQ, English Teaching: Practice & Critique, Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy. She has edited seven Literature Readers for Cambridge University Press, for use in middle-to-high school classes, and is the author of Shakespeare from Orient BlackSwan. Besides these, she occasionally writes for newspapers and periodicals on contemporary cultural politics and higher education. She is the Principal Investigator of the world’s first OER for Indian Writing in English. She has been cited in The New Oxford Shakespeare and The Year’s Work in English Studies.
Dr. Maria Porras Sanchez
Dr. María Porras Sánchez is an assistant professor at the Department of English Studies, Complutense University of Madrid. She has formerly taught at Aberystwyth University, Nebrija University and UniversitatOberta de Catalunya. Her main research areas are graphic narratives and comics, literary translation and postcolonial and transnational literatures in English, with an interest on themes such as precarity, migration, otherness and myth, and their intersections with race, ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality, from Modernism to the present. She currently lectures to undergraduate and postgraduate students courses on Modernist Fiction, Postcolonial Literatures, Ethnicity Literatures and Literary Translation.
She has coedited with Gerardo Vilches Precarious Youth in Contemporary Graphic Narratives: Young Lives in Crisis (Routledge, 2022), and with Esther Sánchez-Pardo and Rosa Burillo Women Poets and Myth in the 20th and 21st Centuries: On Sappho’s Website (Cambridge Scholars, 2018). She has translated more than thirty works including novels, essays, young adult fiction and illustrated books. She has edited and translated Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (Capitán Swing, 2018), by Mona Eltahawy; Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot (Capitán Swing, 2022) by Mikki Kendall, and The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal about Identity, Race, Wealth and Power, by Deirdre Mask (Capitán Swing, 2023). Her last work to date is the volume Myth and Environmentalism: Arts of Resilience for a Damaged Planet (Routledge, 2023), coedited with Esther Sánchez-Pardo.
Dr. Swarnalatha Rangarajan
Dr. Swarnalatha Rangarajan is Professor of English at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras and is passionate about environmental humanities. She is the founding editor of the Indian Journal of Ecocriticism (IJE) and a guest editor for The Trumpeter, the flagship journal of deep ecology movement. Her academic publications include Ecocriticism: Big Ideas and Practical Strategies (2018) and co-edited works titled Ecoambiguity, Community, and Development (2014)and Ecocriticism of the Global South(2015). She is the co-translator of Mayilamma: The Life of a Tribal Eco-Warrior(2018). She is one of the series editors for the Routledge Studies in World Literatures and Environment and the co-editor of the Routledge Book of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication (2019). Her recent co-edited scholarly books include A Handbook of Medical-Environmental Humanities (Bloomsbury Academic 2022) and the forthcoming Literary Desertscapes in the Global South and Beyond: Anthropocene Natureculture((Routledge 2023). She has also authored several research papers in the domain of ecocriticism.
Her short fiction has appeared in anthologies of publishing houses like Penguin, Zubaan, Westland, New Asian Writing, Out of Print Magazine, South Asian Review to name a few. Her poetry has appeared in the collection All the Worlds Between (Yoda Press, 2017) and in Muse India. Her debut novel, Final Instructions was published by Authorspress in 2015. She has co-edited a collection of interviews with Contemporary Women Writers from Tamil Nadu titled Lifescapes which was published by a leading feminist press, Women Unlimited in 2019.
Dr. Sarah Falcus
Dr. Sarah Falcus is a researcher in ageing studies, working at the intersection of ageing studies and literary studies. She is the co-author of Contemporary Narratives of Dementia: Ethics, Ageing, Politics (Routledge, 2019) and co-editor of Contemporary Narratives of Ageing, Illness, Care (2022). Her most recent book is the co-edited collection (with Dr Raquel Medina and Dr Heike Hartung) The Bloomsbury Handbook to Ageing in Contemporary Literature and Film (2023). Her current work centres on two main areas: children’s literature and ageing; and ageing/the lifecourse in science and speculative fiction
Dr. Saradindu Bhattacharya
Saradindu Bhattacharya is Assistant Professor at the Department of English, University of Hyderabad. He has previously taught at the Central University of Karnataka and the Central University of Tamil Nadu. He teaches postgraduate courses on New Literatures in English, Anglo American Poetry, Victorian literature, and Indian literatures and popular culture. He has published journal articles in the domains of the pedagogy of English in India, young adult literature, and popular culture and media. He has also been involved in the development of online educational resources (OERs) on platforms like the UGC’s e-PGpathshala and NPTEL.
Dr. Meenakshi Srihari
Meenakshi Srihari will join Sai University, Chennai as Assistant Professor, School of Arts and Sciences, in January 2024. She previously taught at the Department of English, NIT Andhra Pradesh. Dr Srihari’s research and writing focuses on the Medical Humanities, Graphic Medicine and Transmedial Storyworlds. Her writing has appeared in journals such as BMJ’s Medical Humanities and Media Watch. She has also contributed to Columbia University’s Synapsis and Open Educational Resources such as the University of Hyderabad’s IWE Online and NPTEL.