Thesis Title

The Invention of Nature: State-Building and Environment-Making in the 'Extended' Himalayas

Bio

Amul joined the Department of English & Comparative Literary Studies at Warwick as a doctoral student in 2018. His PhD research, funded by a Chancellor's International Scholarship, explored the links between environmental imaginaries and state-building in India and Nepal. Working at the intersection of environmental humanities, world-literary and postcolonial studies, his thesis looked at the dialectical relationship between the material and imaginative production of the various geographical sites across northern India and Nepal that collectively form what he calls the 'extended' Himalayas--namely the terai, the hill-station, the national park, and the high Himalaya--and the ways they are registered and mediated in the transnational cultural production of the region. Supervised by Prof. Pablo Mukherjee and Dr. Mike Niblett, he completed his PhD without corrections in May 2023.

Prior to Warwick, Amul completed his undergraduate degree at Grinnell College, USA. He then received his MA from SOAS, University of London, where his dissertation situated the writing of Hindi writer Phaniswarnath Renu within an ecocritical framework, for which he was awarded the Noor Inayat Khan Dissertation Prize by the SOAS South Asia Institute.

At Warwick, he co-organised the Flows and Floods: Changing Environments and Cultures conference, funded by a HRC Doctoral Fellowship, is a member of the Warwick Environmental Humanities Network and the Critical South Asia Group, and was an associate editor at Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal for two special issues, on Cannibalism (2020) and Climate-Fiction (2021).

Research Interests

Environmental Humanities, Postcolonial Studies, World-Literature, South Asian histories and cultures

Teaching

2019-2020: EN122 Modes of Reading
2023-2024: EN2E9/EN3E9 States of Damage: 21st Century US Writing and Culture
2023-2024: PX376 Communicating Science
2023-2024: EN2L4 Literature in Theory

Qualifications and Awards

Bachelor of Arts (Honors), Grinnell College, USA (2015)
Master of Arts (Distinction), SOAS, University of London (2017)
Noor Inayat Khan Dissertation Prize, NIK Memorial Trust and SOAS SAI (2017)
Chancellor's International Scholarship, University of Warwick (2019-2022)
HRC Doctoral Fellowship, University of Warwick (2019)

Memberships

Warwick Environmental Humanities Network
WICID - Critical South Asia Group
New Voices in Postcolonial Studies