Sarah Brouillette is Professor in the Department of English at Carleton University, where she teaches contemporary literature alongside topics in cultural theory and social and political thought. She is the author of Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (2007) and Literature and the Creative Economy (2014).
Supriya Chaudhuri is Professor of English (Emerita) at Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Her specializations include European Renaissance literature, cultural history, modernism, critical theory, cinema and sport, and she has led on a number of international research collaborations, one culminating in the co-edited Commodities and Culture in the Colonial World (Routledge, in press). Among recent publications are Reconsidering English Studies in Indian Higher Education (Routledge, 2015), Fields of Play: Sport, Literature and Culture (ed: Orient Blackswan, 2015) Petrarch: the Self and the World (ed: Jadavpur UP, 2012); Conversations with Jacqueline Rose (University of Chicago Press, 2010), and chapter contributions to A Companion to Virginia Woolf (Blackwell, 2016); Celebrating Shakespeare: Commemoration and Cultural Memory (Cambridge UP, 2015); A History of the Indian Novel in English (Cambridge UP, 2015); The Cambridge Companion to Modern Indian Culture (Cambridge UP, 2012); and The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms (Oxford UP, 2010). She also translates modern Bengali poetry and fiction.
Rossen Djagalov’s interests lie in socialist culture globally and, more specifically, in the linkages between cultural producers and audiences in the USSR and abroad. His manuscript, “Premature Postcolonialists: Soviet-Third-World Literary and Cinematic Encounters in the Age of Three Worlds,” reconstructs the history of the main organizations within which those encounters took place–the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association (founded in Tashkent in 1958) and the biannual Tashkent Festival of African, Asian and Latin American Film (1968-1990)–and their consequences for Soviet and Third-World literature and film. His second book project, “The People’s Republic of Letters: Towards a Media History of Twentieth-Century Socialist Internationalism,” examines the relationship between the political left and the different media that at different times played a major role in connecting its publics globally (the proletarian novel of the first half of the 20th century, the singer-songwriter performance of the 1960s, and contemporary documentary film). He is a member of the LeftEast editorial collective. Prior to coming to NYU, Rossen was a lecturer at Harvard’s History and Literature Program, a Penn Humanities Forum postdoctoral fellow, and an Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature at Koç University, Istanbul.
Abhijit Gupta is Associate Professor of English at Jadavpur University, and Director, Jadavpur University Press. He graduated in English from Jadavpur University and received a PhD from Cambridge University for his work on 19th century British publishing. He is co-editor, along with Swapan Chakravorty of the Book History in India series, of which three volumes have been published: Print Areas (2004), Moveable Types (2008) and New Word Order (2011). He was associate editor for South Asia for the Oxford Companion to the Book (2010). He has completed an electronic database and location register of all books printed in Bengali from 1801-1867 and is currently at work on the period 1868-1914. His most recent published works are two translations of Bengali stories for children, titled Funny and Funnier and Mad and Madder, published by Scholastic. His other research areas include science fiction, graphic novels, crime fiction and the 19th century.
Isabel Hofmeyr is Professor of African Literature at Wits and Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. Her prize-winning books include The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim’s Progress (1994); Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading (2013) and Ten Books that Shaped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons (2015) (co-edited with Antoinette Burton).
Hala Halim is the author of Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism: An Archive, which interrogates how modern Alexandria was nominated as the cosmopolitan Middle Eastern city par excellence. Arguing that Alexandrian cosmopolitanism is a Eurocentric discourse, the book is a comparative study of literary representations by canonical writers such as C. P. Cavafy, E. M. Forster, Lawrence Durrell as well as the virtually unpublished librettist Bernard de Zogheb. The book sets the European representations in dialogue with Arabic critical, historical and artistic texts to consider alternative and more egalitarian modes of solidarity. Her current project, on postcolonial cosmopolitanism, builds on her article “Lotus, the Afro-Asian Nexus, and Global South Comparatism.” The article addresses the journal Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings once published by the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association that she has been researching for many years in relation to post-Bandung Third Worldism. Other projects include editing Bernard de Zogheb’s unpublished libretti and a study that develops her previous work on the Egyptian novelist and critic Edwar al-Kharrat.
Paulo Horta is a scholar of world literature, the works and authors who exert an impact beyond their cultures of origin. He is currently interested in the cross-cultural collaborations that influenced The Thousand and One Nights, and the reception of the works of 16th Century Portuguese author Luis de Camões, who lived in the Middle East and South Asia. His latest book, Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights will be published by Harvard University Press in January 2017. His position in Abu Dhabi, long a cultural crossroads, will provide him a unique opportunity to further his study of both. He joins NYU Abu Dhabi from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, where he was an assistant professor. There, he was instrumental in developing the university’s world literature program from the ground up. He is co-editing a volume for the MLA series Approaches to Teaching World Literature and has presented the results of his research on the 1001 Nights and world literature at Harvard, Cornell, Princeton, SOAS, and the Universidad de Sevilla. At Simon Fraser University he was the recipient of a World Literature and Cultural Research Grant and a President’s Research Grant. Horta serves as co-director of a multi-campus research group on world literature, which is hosting a five-year series of interconnected seminars across several continents. He has previously taught classes in political science and literature on globalization, immigration and multiculturalism, and genres and methods in world literature.
Anjali Nerlekar is Associate Professor in the Department of African, Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Literatures (AMESALL) at Rutgers University, with research interests in global modernisms, Indian print cultures, Marathi literature, Indo-Caribbean literature, spatial and cartographic studies, and translation studies. She has published articles in Wasafiri, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and other journals, on the poetry of Arun Kolatkar, A. K. Ramanujan, Dilip Chitre, and David Dabydeen. She has a book, Bombay Modern: Arun Kolatkar and Bilingual Literary Culture (2016) and is the co-editor of the special double issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing titled “The Worlds of Bombay Poetry” (2017). In collaboration with Dr. Bronwen Bledsoe at Cornell University, she has also created an ongoing collection of documents and manuscripts related to English and Marathi Bombay poetry titled “The Bombay Poets’ Archive.”
Francesca Orsini is Professor of Hindi and South Asian Literature at SOAS. She took her undergraduate degree in Hindi at the University of Venice, followed by a long spell in Delhi. Her PhD research at SOAS was on the Hindi public sphere of the 1920s and ’30s, published as The Hindi Public Sphere 1920-1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism (OUP Delhi 2002, Hindi tr. Vani 2010). She taught at the University of Cambridge for several years and joined SOAS in 2006, where she teaches courses on Hindi language, literature, the literary history of South Asia, and contemporary politics of culture. Her most recent book, Print and Pleasure (Permanent Black 2010), explored the genres of commercial publishing in nineteenth-century north India, while the collection she edited on Hindi and Urdu Before the Divide (Orient Blackswan 2009) proposed ways of approaching Hindi and Urdu literary genres not as watertight traditions but as possibilities within the multilingual literary and linguistic world of early modern North India. At present she is working on two projects: an international collaboration with SARAI/CSDS (New Delhi) on Hinglish, funded by the British Academy; and a new project on a multilingual history of Awadh that seeks at the same time to engage with current models of world literature by offering a ground-up perspective that is mindful of local audiences and of multiple levels of literary production and circulation.
James Procter teaches in the School of English at Newcastle University (UK). His work on postcolonial print cultures includes research on transnational reception and readerships, and on radio, writing and the remediation of print. Recent projects and publications include Reading Across Worlds (2014), which was supported by the AHRC-funded “Devolving Diasporas” project (2007-2012), and the Leverhulme-funded research project (2012-present), Scripting Empire.
Emily Sibley is a PhD Candidate at New York University. Her dissertation, “Uncivil Tongues: Genealogies of Adab in Modern Arabic Literature,” examines how satire, protest, and incivility are central to an expanded view of literary practices in modern Arabic literature. She holds an M.Phil (with distinction) in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from Oxford University and a BA in English from Wellesley College. Her research interests include 19th-21st century Arabic literature, political theory and praxis, translation theory, Arabic literary history, and Maghrebi literature. She received a Mellon Dissertation Fellowship for 2017-2018 and was a Center for Arabic Studies Abroad Fellow in 2014-2015, stationed in Amman, Jordan.
Rajeswari Sunder Rajan was educated in Bombay and Washington DC. She taught for many years in India before moving to the U.K., where she was Professorial Fellow at Wolfson College and Reader in the English faculty at the University of Oxford. Dr. Sunder Rajan’s work spans debates about the relationship between gender, postcolonialism and culture in the context of post-Independence Indian nationalism. Additionally, she works on British nineteenth-century literature and Anglophone postcolonial literature. Recent publications include ‘Zeitgeist and the Literary Text: India, 1947, in Qurratulain Hyder’s My Temples, Too, and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children,’ in Critical Inquiry (Summer 2014), ‘Feminism’s Futures: The Limits and Ambitions of Rokeya’s Dream,’ in Economic and Political Weekly (Oct, 2015), and ‘A Woman’s Worth’ in Granta (2015). A volume of essays, Commodities and Culture in the Colonial World, jointly edited with Professors Supriya Chaudhuri, Josephine McDonagh, and Brian Murray is forthcoming (Routledge, 2017). The volume is the product of a three-year international collaboration on a project titled ‘Commodities and Culture, 1851-1914’, funded by a Leverhulme Network Grant. Dr. Sunder Rajan is currently completing a book on the post-Midnight’s Children Indian novel in English, while starting another (jointly with Anuradha Needham) on Women in Indian Cinema.
Ruvani Ranasinha received her DPhil from Oxford University. She is Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial Literatures at King’s College London. Her monograph South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain: Culture in Translation (OUP 2007) was the first book to trace a literary history of South Asian writing in Britain, and the emergence and development of Britain’s literary market for Asian writers through research into their literary and publishers’ archives. It instigated a new strand of scholarship on South Asian writers’ reception and archives. As Co-investigator of the AHRC-funded Making Britain: South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad project (2007-10) she was the lead editor of the first interdisciplinary anthology of international archival sources on the subject, South Asians and the Shaping of Britain, 1870-1950 (MUP, 2013). More recently, she has shown that some of Sri Lanka’s most celebrated novelists have been appreciated by an international readership for reasons that trouble scholars of Sri Lankan culture and politics: the global circulation and legitimation of this work has served to naturalise a dominant vision of Sri Lanka as a place of unnatural beauty beset by centuries of atavistic and irrational violence, which has a long colonial history. This discourse serves and furthers a conventional definition of the literary as that which avoids direct engagement with the political. Her third monograph, Contemporary Diasporic South Asian Women Writers: Gender, Narration and Globalisation (Palgrave 2016), and role as co-investigator on a Leverhulme–funded International Network Postcolonial Urban Infrastructures and Literature (2014 -2016) further explore the circulation and global consumption of diasporic South Asian texts.
Krupa Shandilya is Assistant Professor of Sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies at Amherst College. Her monograph Intimate Relations: Social Reform and the Late Nineteenth Century South Asian Novel (forthcoming, FlashPoints, Northwestern University Press) engages in a comparative analysis in two South Asian literary traditions, namely Bengali and Urdu. Her book argues that both literary traditions resolve the “women’s question” or the reform of marginal female subjects such as widows and courtesans through surprisingly similar notions of reform and literary narrative techniques. She has also published a translation of and written a critical introduction to Urdu novelist M.H. Ruswa’s novella The Madness of Waiting (Zubaan/University of Chicago Press, 2013; with Taimoor Shahid). Her third book project, The Poetics of Revolution: The Progressive Writers’ Association and Contemporary Bombay Cinema, focuses on the influence of the romantic and political registers of Urdu poetry and literature in contemporary Bollywood cinema. Her research and teaching interests include Hindi and Urdu literature and poetry, Bengali literature, postcolonial theory, feminist theory, and South Asian cinema. Her work has appeared in New Cinemas, Postcolonial Text, Gender and History and South Asian Popular Culture.
Postcolonial Print Cultures 