Dr Bhagya Casaba Somashekar
Lecturer in English

Summary

I specialise in contemporary, postcolonial, and world literatures, with a focus on representations of political crises, cities of the global south, cosmopolitanism and migration, speculative fiction, and literature and the Anthropocene. I have particular interests in political theory on states of exception and in the philosophy of temporality, especially how they both relate to modes of literary and visual representation. I also have a strong interest in comparative approaches to Indian literatures—particularly modernist and contemporary writing in English and Kannada.

I completed my DPhil in English at the University of Oxford in 2021, where I wrote on representations of the Indian Emergency (1975-77) in Indian writings in English. I completed my MA and MPhil degrees in English at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. My MPhil dissertation examined the construction of time in contemporary urban writing on the city of Delhi.

My academic work has been published in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Oxford Research in English, Wasafiri, Postcolonial Text, Contemporary Literature, and The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures, among others. My pedagogy-focused writing can be found in the English Review magazine, Writers Make Worlds, and Teaching Anglophone South Asian Diasporic Literature (MLA Options for Teaching). I am now working on a monograph based on my doctoral dissertation, titled "Tropes of Exception: Representations of the Emergency (1975-77) in Indian Literature." 

I am co-convenor of The Postcolonial Anthropocene Research Network (http://pococene.com/). Based on my work for the network, I am currently co-editing a collection of essays on “The Postcolonial Anthropocene: Contemporaries in Crisis.” Besides my collaborative work in this area, I am also working on a new research project on decolonial speculative fiction and its relationship with world literary studies and the climate crisis.

At Brunel, I teach postcolonial and world literature, genre fiction, postcolonial Shakespeare, women's movements, and global modernisms.