General

BA, MA (Delhi), PhD (University of Illinois, Chicago), Dr. Rashmi Varma grew up in India. After finishing her Master’s degree in English Literature, she taught briefly at Jesus and Mary College at the University of Delhi. She moved to the US to work on her Ph.D. in English and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Prior to Warwick, she was as an Assistant Professor of English and Cultural Studies at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

Research interests

Dr. Varma’s areas of research include: the postcolonial city, postcolonial Indian and African theory, literature and culture, feminism in a global context, representations of indigeneity in postcolonial India, and the theory of world literature.

In 2011-2012, she was on a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship to complete work on her book entitled Modern Tribal: Representing Indigeneity in Postcolonial India.

Selected recent publications

Books:

The Postcolonial City and its Subjects: London, Nairobi, Bombay (Routledge, 2011)

(Reviewed in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies Vol. 15, Issue 2, 2013; Modern Fiction Studies 59.1 Spring 2013; Postcolonial Studies vol. 16, no. 3, 331-335, 2013)

Co-edited with Robyn Warhol, et. al. Women’s Worlds: the McGraw-Hill Anthology of Women’s Writing in English Across the Globe (2008)

Articles:

"Beyond the Politics of Representation: the Indigenous Subject of New Subaltern Politics", in Alf Gunvald Nilsen and Srila Roy, eds. Reconceptualising Subaltern Politics (Oxford University Press, 2014)

“Telling Lives: Secularism in the Time of Late Nationalism”, essay in Sukhwant Dhaliwal and Nira Yuval-Davis, eds. Women Against Fundamentalism: Stories of Dissent and Solidarity (Lawrence and Wishart, 2014)

“Primitive Accumulation: the Political Economy of Indigenous Art in Postcolonial India”, Third Text vol. 27, no. 6 (2013); pp. 748-761. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09528822.2013.857902#.UvoLV_3Rr-Y

“Fast-Forward Backwardness: An essay on Patna”, in Moving Worlds: a Journal of Transcultural Writings – Special Issue on South Asian Cities (2013).

“’Zone of Occult Instability”: Theorising the Postcolonial City”, essay in Isabel Carrera Suarez, ed. Transcultural Cities (Mallorca: University Press of the UIB, 2011)

“Marxism and Postcolonial Studies”, essay co-authored with Neil Lazarus, Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism (Historical Materialism Series: Brill Academic Publishers, 2008)

Teaching and supervision

Dr. Varma teaches courses on postcolonial literatures and theory, especially from Africa and South Asia, world literature, feminist literary theory and transnational feminisms at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels, including EN 251: New Literatures in English; EN 270: Transnational Feminism: Theory, Practice, Activism; EN904: Problems and Modes in Postcolonial Literature; EN913: Feminist Literary Theory; and EN938: Postcolonial Theory.

Details of her postgraduate supervision can be found here.

Conferences, Lectures and Workshops (most recent)

"The Image-Function of the Periphery: Photographing Adivasis in the Age of Neoliberalism", paper to be presented at the Contemporary Cultures of Opposition in Asia, Africa and the Middle East (SOAS, London, January 2014)

"UnModifying India: New Challenges for Feminism and Nationalism", paper presented at seminar on Gender, Nationalism and Fundamentalism (London, November 2013)

Workshop on Marxism and Postcolonial Theory: What's Left of the Debate? 10th Annual Historical Materialism Conference (London, 2013)

Workshop on Rethinking Subaltern Politics, Bergen, Norway (2013)

Workshop on "Extra-politics", University of Goettingen, Germany (2012)

Workshop on The Politics of Aesthetics, University of Warwick (2012)

University of Durham, English Department Seminar Series (2012)

“Provincialising the Global City: from Bombay to Mumbai”, talk given to the Young India Foundation Fellows, New Delhi (12 August 2011)

On Gond Art as Resistance, Panel presentation at an exhibition/workshop entitled A Disappearing World: Ancient Traditions Under Threat in Tribal India (SOAS, University of London, April 2011)

“Beyond the Politics of Representation: the Indigenous Subject of New Subaltern Politics”, paper presented at the Annual Asian Studies Conference in Honolulu, Hawaii (March 31-April 3, 2011).

“A Million Indias Now”, talk given as part of a series “New Perspectives on National Identity” at Liverpool John Moores University (9 November 2010)

Respondent, Sumit Sarkar on “Writing a Marxian History of India”, Workshop organized by Historical Materialism, Goldsmiths College (7 July 2010)

“Primitive Accumulation: the Cultural Economy of Indigenous Art in Postcolonial India”, talk given at “The Gond and Beyond: The Predicament of Contemporary ‘Ethnic’ Arts”, a symposium at Wellesley College, Mass. (April 10, 2010)

Associate Professor

H540; ext. 23666; email: rashmi.varma@warwick.ac.uk