Dr Rashmi Varma
Reader/Associate Professor
Director of Impact
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. Prior to Warwick, I was as an Assistant Professor of English and Cultural Studies at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.
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:
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
Recent publications
BOOKS AND SPECIAL ISSUES:
Co-edited with Sharae Deckard, Marxism, Postcolonial Theory and the Future of Critique: Critical Engagements with Benita Parry (New York and London: Routledge, 2018)
Co-edited with Subir Sinha, Marxism and Postcolonial Theory: What is Left of the Debate? Special symposium of the journal Critical Sociology (2017)
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:
"Policing the Pandemic in London", in Social Text
*“Elleowen Deeowen: the Postcolonial Literary Republic of London”, essay in Ato Quayson and Jini K Watson, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Global Cities (forthcoming)
*“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), forthcoming
*“Collectivity and Crisis in the Long Twentieth Century”, co-authored with Warwick Research Collective Modern Language Quarterly 81:4 (December 2020); pp. 465-489.
*https://thewire.in/diplomacy/narendra-modi-london-protests-diaspora-kathua
*"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)
*“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)
Qualifications
- BA; MA (Delhi)
- PhD (University of Illinois, Chicago)
Office hours
(In-person and via Teams)
2022-23
TERM 1
Mondays, 12-1; Thursdays, 4-5 and by appointment
You can book here: OFFICE HOURS
Please email me at Rashmi.Varma@warwick.ac.uk for appointments at other times
Teaching
Undergraduate modules
EN251 New Literatures in English
EN270 Transnational Feminism
Postgraduate modules
EN904 Problems and Modes in Postcolonial Literature
EN913 Feminist Literary Theory
EN938 Postcolonial Theory