Prof. Ira Raja is Professor of English at the University of Delhi. She received her PhD from La Trobe University, Australia. She works at the intersection of postcolonial studies, ageing, and material culture, with a focus on Indian literary and visual cultures. Her research examines how experiences of care, memory, and everyday life are shaped by, and in turn reshape, broader formations of identity, nation, and migration. She has published widely in journals such as Journal of Aging Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Thesis Eleven, and has edited and co-edited several books, including Grey Areas: An Anthology of Contemporary Indian Fiction on Ageing.
As a Fulbright-Nehru scholar, Prof. Raja is exploring memory as a relational and culturally embedded process. Drawing on contemporary Indian fiction, her project challenges medicalized approaches that frame ageing primarily in terms of decline, showing how forgetting can also enable reinterpretation, selfhood, and social connection. By bringing multilingual Indian literary archives into dialogue with global debates in memory and ageing studies, the project contributes a South Asian perspective to interdisciplinary conversations in the humanities and the medical humanities.