Thesis Working-Title

The Invention of Nature: State-Building and Environment-Making in northern South Asia

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, explores the links between environmental imaginaries, state-building, and identity-formation in South Asia. Working at the intersection of environmental humanities, world-literary and postcolonial studies, he looks at the dialectical relationship between the material and imaginative production of various geographies of northern India and Nepal--namely the terai, the hill-station, the national park, and the high Himalaya--and the ways they are registered and mediated in the multilingual and transnational cultural production of the region. His PhD is supervised by Prof. Pablo Mukherjee and Dr. Mike Niblett.

Prior to Warwick, Amul completed his undergraduate degree at Grinnell College, USA. He then received a Master of Arts from SOAS, University of London, where his MA dissertation situated the writing of Hindi writer Phaniswarnath Renu within an ecocritical framework.

At Warwick, he co-organised the Flows and Floods: Changing Environments and Cultures conference, funded by a HRC Doctoral Fellowship, and is a member of the Warwick Environmental Humanities Network and the Critical South Asia Group. He has taught on the EN122 Modes of Reading undergraduate module, 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 Asia

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