Language and Literature Archives

Zahra Rizvi

Ms. Zahra Rizvi is a Ph.D. Scholar and Senior Research Fellow at the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Her research area is an intersection of 21st Century popular culture, literature and media of the United States and the Americas, Urban Studies, Utopia/Dystopia Studies, Youth Activism, and Game Studies. Rizvi studies the political ecology of urban dystopias at this intersection to transform academia in its orientation towards ‘future studies’. Rizvi has presented papers at numerous national and international conferences and has publications in various online and print journals.

Rizvi holds a master’s degree in English literature from the University of Delhi, New Delhi, where she graduated as a double gold medallist. She is the founding-member of the Indian chapter of Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA). She was the Ministry of Education (MHRD) SPARC Fellow in Digital Humanities at Michigan State University, MI, in 2020. In 2021, she was awarded the Electronic Literature Organization Fellowship to work on media archaeology and e-lit practices in South Asia. In 2022, she was awarded the International Youth Library (IYL) Fellowship to conduct research at IYL, Germany, and access their resources, archives and database, for her research in Children’s and Young Adult literary practices and communities, youth activism, and ethical and transformative digital futurisms.

As a Fulbright-Nehru fellow at Yale University, Rizvi will further her doctoral research considerations and study urban dystopias, their political ecology, and the global/local/glocal responses to the same in contemporary times, especially from South Asian and East Asian perspectives. The Fulbright-Nehru program enables her to study the planetary flows of being and information that underlie the global dystopian condition in contemporary times and explore and conceptualise ‘better futures’ based on safe and sustainable ethics of care.

Amritha Radhakrishnan

Ms. Amritha Radhakrishnan is a Ph.D. candidate and Teaching Assistant at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Uttarakhand. The larger fields within which her doctoral research is embedded are medical humanities, gender studies, memory studies and visual studies. Drawing theoretical frameworks from these fields, she studies the entailment of traumatic memories of illnesses in graphic narratives using the unique formal properties of the comic medium and the disentanglement of represented memory by readers.

Ms. Radhakrishnan is a recipient of the JRF fellowship awarded by the University Grants Commission (UGC), Government of India for doctoral research and is currently a Senior Research Fellow (SRF). She holds a master’s degree in English literature from Sacred Heart College, Kerala and a bachelor’s in English literature and communication studies (double major) from St. Xavier’s College, Kerala, where she was a university rank holder. She has presented papers at numerous national and international conferences, including “The Child of the Future” Conference hosted by the University of Cambridge, where she also mediated a session. Ms. Radhakrishnan has been a resource person for a talk series organized by the Sacred Heart College, where she spoke on the various possibilities of graphic medicine as a field. She has co-authored an article on the functions of graphic illness narratives, published by the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Taylor & Francis (2022). Her forthcoming book chapter on representations of chronic pain in the graphic medium will be published in a volume called Keywords/Images in Graphic Medicine. Apart from her research, she devotes her time to travel and cinema. She is a trained Carnatic classical singer and can speak five languages. She is passionate about learning new languages and understanding different cultures.

Ms. Radhakrishnan’s doctoral dissertation focuses on the emergence of graphic medicine, its production and consumption, with particular emphasis on the socio-political role of personal illness narratives in the advocacy for rights and in developing health literacy. As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, she is furthering her research by gaining access to cartoon museums and libraries and by engaging in conversations with inter-disciplinary scholars in the fields pertaining to her doctoral research.

Kashish Dua

Ms. Kashish Dua is a doctoral candidate in English at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi and Assistant Professor, Department of English, Jesus and Mary College, University of Delhi. Her Ph.D. examines the intersections of queerness, personal narratives, and citizenship in the context of post-Independence India. This project aims to expand the current theorizations on citizenship in India by interrogating the forms citizenship takes in the case of queer individuals. It particularly focuses on the construction of the subject and the process of subjectivation in personal narratives in print by queer individuals of Indian origin. She has an M.Phil. with distinction in English from Jamia Millia Islamia and a master’s and bachelor’s in English from Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. Her research interests are queer studies, gender and South Asian literature, and partition literature.

Ms. Dua has conducted several workshops and delivered talks on queer theory and queer literature, including a panel discussion at the first Awadh Queer Literature Festival, Lucknow in 2019. Some of her publications include an edited critical edition of William Shakespeare’s As You Like It published by Prentice Hall India in 2019; a co-authored encyclopedia entry on “LGBTQ and Hinduism” for Oxford Bibliographies, published online by the Oxford University Press in 2022; a chapter titled “Rainbow Waters: Towards a Queer Coalition between India and Botswana” in a Routledge India book Cosmopolitan Cultures and Oceanic Thought (2023) edited by Dilip Menon and Nishat Zaidi; and an article on “Ismat Chughtai’s Obscenity Trial” forthcoming in The LGBTQ+ History Book by DK London. Ms. Dua was a member of the organizing committee of an international conference titled “Language Ideologies and the ‘Vernacular’ in South Asian Colonial and Post-colonial Literature(s) and Public Spheres” in 2021 that was organized through the collaborative efforts of the University of Heidelberg, Germany and the SPARC project on “Debating and Calibrating the Vernacular in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asian Literature and Culture” by the Ministry of Education, Government of India.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, Ms. Dua is striving to decolonize the genre of queer memoirs through a comparative study of queer personal writings in India and the “coming out” narratives of the Global North.

Madhu Singh

Dr. Madhu Singh is Professor at the Department of English and Modern European Languages, University of Lucknow. After a Ph.D. in modern British poetry, she branched into exploring different dimensions of the British rule in India. Her research interests over the last two decades include anticolonial movements in India, colonial epidemics, Indian Renaissance under colonialism, and documentation of endangered languages and communities. She recently edited a book titled Outbreaks: An Indian Pandemic Reader (Pencraft international, New Delhi, 2021), which deals with the complex challenges of past and present epidemics/pandemics in India in their socio-cultural, literary and historical contexts.

Dr. Singh received a visiting scholarship at the School of Asian and Oriental Studies (SOAS), University of London in 2018-19 for her project on the Bene Israel Jews of India.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellowship, Dr. Singh is working on “Revolutionary Print Culture, Ephemeral Remains, and Vernacular Subjectivities in North America During and After Ghadar Movement (1910-1940)”. She aims to trace the role of California-based periodicals by expatriate Punjabi-Sikh writers in the anticolonial struggle in India, spanning the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She is also redressing gaps and silences in existing research on the Ghadar movement from interdisciplinary perspectives.