Professor

Email: Rashmi dot Varma at warwick dot ac dot uk

Faculty of Arts Building 5.27

University of Warwick

Coventry CV4 7AL

---

About

I have a BA degree in English (Honours) from Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi, India and a Master’s degree in English Literature from the University of Delhi. After teaching briefly at Jesus and Mary College at the University of Delhi, I moved to the United States to work on my Ph.D. in English and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I taught as an Assistant Professor of English and Cultural Studies at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. I joined Warwick in 2004.

Research interests

My 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.

I welcome PhD applications in any of the areas listed above.

In 2011-2012, I won a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship to work on my book entitled Modern Tribal: Representing Indigeneity in Postcolonial India.

I am a member of the editorial collective of the journal Feminist Dissent

Other research projects include:

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/tate-exchange/workshop/production-truth-justice-and-histories

See also:

Teaching and supervision

I teach courses on postcolonial literatures and theory, especially from Africa and South Asia, world literature, feminist literary theory and transnational feminism at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. My modules include:

• EN251: New Literatures in English
• EN270: Transnational Feminism: Theory, Practice, Activism
• EN904: Problems and Modes in Postcolonial Literature
• EN913: Feminist Literary Theory
• EN938: Postcolonial Theory

I currently supervise the following doctoral student:

• Raad Khair Allah
• Tyler Ball (Chancellor's International Scholar)
• Amirah Mohiddin, Hybridity, Islamic Feminism and Fantasy: Constructing a counter-memory of the stereotypical Arab female in Arabic fantasy literature (M4C co-supervision with University of Leicester)
• Ragesree Roy
• Archana Vinod (Chancellor's International Scholar)

Recent and major publications

BOOKS AND SPECIAL ISSUES:

Modern Tribal: Representing Indigeneity in Postcolonial India (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press)

Ends of the Global City: Disaffection, Displacement and the New Political Ecologies of the Urban Co-edited with Jini Kim Watson (Palgrave, 2024)

Edge Cities, a Dossier for Social Text special issue on Sociality at the End of the World Vol. 39, No. 4 (149), December 1, 2021; co-edited with Ashley Dawson

Secular States, Fundamentalist Politics. Special issue of Feminist Dissent Issue 5 co-edited with Yasmin Rehman, Gita Sahgal and Nira Yuval-Davis (Number 5, December 2020)

Marxism, Postcolonial Theory and the Future of Critique: Critical Engagements with Benita Parry, Co-edited with Sharae Deckard (New York and London: Routledge, 2018)

Marxism and Postcolonial Theory: What is Left of the Debate? Co-edited with Subir Sinha, Special symposium of the journal Critical Sociology vol. 43, Issue 4-5 (2017); pp. 545-558.

The Postcolonial City and its Subject: London, Nairobi, Bombay (Routledge, 2014; paperback)

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

(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; Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies vol. 1, no. 2, 2013; Journal of Postcolonial Writing vol. 49, issue 2, 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:

“Everyday Feminism and the Pedagogy of Social Reproduction in Postcolonial India”, Roundtable Discussion: World-culture and social reproduction Feminist Theory Vol. 25, Issue 2, April 2024; pp. 242-259. Special Issue: Social Reproduction Feminism and World-Culture eds. Sharae Deckard and Kate Houlden

“Reading ‘the Signs of our Times’: Aijaz Ahmad on Literature and the World”, in Radical Philosophy 2.15, Autumn 2023, pp. 69-75.

Introduction, Ends of the Global City: Disaffection, Displacement and the New Political Ecologies of the Urban Co-edited with Jini Kim Watson (Palgrave, 2024)

“Riotous Nations: The Short Story of the Partition the Politics of Modernity” in Jumana Bayeh, Helen Groth and Julian Murphet, eds. Writing The Global Riot: Literature in a Time of Crisis (Oxford University Press, 2023); pp. 104-121.

“’The Whole Empire in Little’: London as the Capital of World Literature”, essay in Ato Quayson and Jini K Watson, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Global Cities (2023); pp. 83-97.

“Primitivism in the Peripheries: Reflections on Auritro Majumder’s Insurgent Imaginations: World Literature and the Periphery” in Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 9 (3), 2022; 417-423.

“Policing the Pandemic in London”, essay in Social Text special issue on Sociality at the End of the World Vol. 39, No. 4 (149), December 1, 2021

“Essaying Solidarity: ‘Kamraid’ Roy and the Politics of Representation”, essay in special issue on Anglophone Literature, its Critics and the Left, Modern Fiction Studies 67.2 (June 2021)

“Extracting Indigeneity: Revaluing the Work of World Literature in These Times”, In Francesco Giusti and Benjamin Lewis Robinson, eds. The Work of World Literature (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2021)

'Understanding the Conundrum: Secular States, Fundamentalist Politics', Feminist Dissent, 5 (2020), 3-18; with Yasmin Rehman, Gita Sahgal and Nira Yuval-Davis.

“The girls of Jamia”, poem by Amir Aziz, translated from the Urdu, Feminist Dissent, 5 (2020).

“Collectivity and Crisis in the Long Twentieth Century”, co-authored with Warwick Research Collective Modern Language Quarterly 81:4 (December 2020); pp. 465-489.

*"Anti-Imperialism", in Robin Goodman, ed. Bloomsbury Handbook of Twenty-First Century Feminist Theory (2018)

*“’Broken Histories’: the Tribal and the Modern in Arun Joshi’s The Strange Case of Billy Biswas”, in Sharae Deckard and Rashmi Varma, eds. Marxism, Postcolonial Theory and the Future of Critique: Critical Engagements with Benita Parry (Routledge, 2018)

*Co-authored with Sharae Deckard, “Against the Grain: An Introduction to Benita Parry’s Intellectual Itinerary” in Sharae Deckard and Rashmi Varma, eds. Marxism, Postcolonial Theory and the Future of Critique: Critical Engagements with Benita Parry (Routledge, 2018)

*"UnModifying India: Sexual Violence and the Politics of Hindutva in Contemporary India", Feminist Dissent, issue 2 Special issue edited by Nira Yuval-Davis and Nadje Al-Ali (April 2017)

*Co-authored with Sukhwant Dhaliwal and Chitra Nagarajan, "Why Feminist Dissent?" in Feminist Dissent, issue 1 (July 2016)

*Co-authored with Subir Sinha, "Marxism and Postcolonial Theory: What is Left of the Debate?" Introduction to a special issue of Critical Sociology (December 2015)

*"Prior to Erasure: Looking for Adivasis in Photographs", essay in Arundhati Boutier-Virmani, ed. The Aesthetics of Power and Protest (Routledge, 2015)

*"The Gleam and the Darkness: Representations of the Postcolonial City", in Ato Quayson, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Postcolonial Novel (2015)

*"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 125 (2013)

Qualifications

• BA; MA (Delhi)
• PhD (University of Illinois, Chicago)