Kalrav Vashishtha
PhD candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies (2025—)
Email: kalrav.vashishtha@warwick.ac.uk
Supervisors: Professor Mike Niblett and Dr Caitlin Vandertop
Funding: Chancellor's International Scholarship
About
Kalrav is a first-year doctoral researcher in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Warwick. His project examines the representations of human-plant entanglements in contemporary postcolonial historical novels. It explores how these world-literary texts demonstrate multispecies relations as governed by, yet also disrupting the extractive logics of colonial capitalism—within specific ecological sites, namely, gardens, plantations and forests, and in the ecological routes of transnational trade networks and botanical explorations.
Research Interests
Plant Humanities | Historical Fiction Studies | World-Literary Studies | FolklorePublications
July 2025: Vashishtha, Kalrav, and Tulika Chandra. “Of Didacticism and Decapitations: The Mother-in-Law/Daughter-in-Law Relationship in North Indian Women’s Folk Songs.” Journal of American Folklore, vol. 138, no. 549, pp. 277–299.
June 2025: Vashishtha, Kalrav. “Autofictional Television Authorship: (Para)Texts of Queer Selves in Please Like Me and Special.” The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 14, no. 1, 2025, pp. 75–87.
Conference Papers
November 2025: "Excavating Botanical Pasts in the Postcolonial Historical Novel." Historical Fiction in/and the Anthropocene, Historical Fictions Research Network.
October 2024: "South Asian Children’s Literature and the Aesthetics of Climate Change." Climate Emergency: When Popular Cultures Cry Out for an Ecological Awakening, Popular Culture Association of France and La Rochelle University.
July 2024: "Charismatic Megaflora and Environmental Artivism: The Language of Ents in The Lord of the Rings." Ecopoetics and Environmental Artivism, London Arts-Based Research Centre.