Members

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Dr. Abin Chakraborty is currently teaching as an Assistant Professor in English in Chandernagore College. His articles have been published in national and international journals and anthologies and he is the co-editor of Uneven Terrains: Critical Perspectives in Postcolonialism.

Adam has recently completed a PhD at the University of York, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. His thesis was entitled '"The Battle for the Enlightenment": Rushdie, Islam, and the West', and in 2013 he was awarded a Doctoral Fellowship by the Humanities Research Centre recognising him as the most promising senior doctoral researcher in the Department of English and Related Literature. In 2012 he was awarded a short-term research fellowship by the Manuscripts and Rare Books Library at Emory University, Atlanta to study the Salman Rushdie Papers. He has presented his research at conferences across the UK and Europe, most recently being invited to speak at Uppsala University’s ‘Transnational Relations in the Eighteenth Century’, and has taught undergraduate courses on critical theory, the Romantic period, and eighteenth-century London. After being awarded a UK Scholarship by the Indian National Trust for Arts and Cultural Heritage (INTACH), he recently gave a series of invited lectures at universities around India, and conducted research into the postcolonial implications of Rushdie’s representations of Akbar and Fatehpur Sikri in 'The Enchantress of Florence', and their relations to post-independence Indian textbook historiographies. In June 2013 he was the lead organiser of 'Encounters, Affinities, Legacies: the Eighteenth Century in the Present Day', convening a two-day academic conference with speakers from around the world, and curating an arts festival involving over thirty film makers, artists, musicians, illustrators, photographers, actors, dancers, and musicians at King's Manor, York. http://www.18thcenturyinthepresent.com His forthcoming publications include ‘The Fatwa and the Philosophe: Rushdie, Voltaire, and Islam’ in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (2016 - available online now through SAGE Journals), and ‘Islam, Bible in – Literature’ in The Encyclopaedia of the Bible and its Reception (De Gruyter, 2015). He has also been invited to contribute a chapter on Rushdie's forthcoming novel 'Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights' in a new anthology of Rushdie criticism entitled 'Mapping Out The Rushdie Republic: Some Recent Surveys', edited by Tapan Kumar Ghosh and Prasanta Bhattacharya, to be published by Orient BlackSwan in 2016.

Aroosa Kanwal is Assistant Professor in English Literature at International Islamic University, Islamabad, Pakistan. She received her PhD from Lancaster University, UK. She completed her MA and MPhil at the International Islamic University, Islamabad. Her first monograph Rethinking Identities in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction: Beyond 9/11 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015) received the KLF-Coca-Cola award for the best non-fiction book of the year 2015 written in English by the writer of Pakistani origin in 2016. Aroosa’s second book The Routledge Companion to Pakistani Anglophone Writing (UK: Routledge, 2018) (co-editor Saiyma Aslam) is the first companion to Pakistani anglophone literature. She teaches Global Muslim Narratives, Modern Drama, Postcolonial literatures, Pakistani Literature in English and Contemporary Short Fiction. Aroosa’s research and teaching interests focus on post-9/11 constructions of Muslims and Islam in relation to Islamophobic discourse, politics of representation, and questions of migration, borders, identity and resistance in contemporary Pakistani Anglophone fiction and Muslim writing. Her chapters on these connections can be found in Claire Chambers and Caroline Herbert, Eds., Imagining Muslims in South Asia and the Diaspora (Routledge, 2014) and Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe, ed., Consciousness, Theatre, Literature and the Arts (UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012).

I am a PhD student focusing on Postcolonial Literature at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, USA I am also an Assistant Professor of English (Currently on Study Leave) at Comilla University, Bangladesh

Amber Lascelles is currently completing her PhD at the University of Leeds, UK. Her thesis focuses on resistance to neoliberal capitalism in contemporary black women’s fiction. She co-directs the intersectional feminist research group Women’s Paths and runs a number of initiatives for women of colour in academia.

I am the Postgraduate and Early Career Representative for the PSA. I am also a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the School of Arts, University of Leicester, working on representations of queer Muslim diasporas in international fiction and film.

Amber Murrey Ndewa recently completed her PhD in Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the lived experiences of structural and economic violence, oil extraction in Central Africa, resistance practices and Pan-African thought. Amber’s PhD thesis, "A Decolonial Mixtape of Structural Violence & Resistance in Two Towns Along the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline", is an ethnographic analysis of the structural violence that both preceded and accompanied the implementation of the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline. Through a comparative ethnography of two towns alongside the pipeline (Kribi and Nanga-Eboko), she advances an ethnographically oriented articulation of structural violence that challenges a dominant focus on visible (and rendering visible) social phenomenon within literatures of structural violence and resistance. Amber is the 2014/15 African and African Diaspora Studies Dissertation Write-Up Fellow at Boston College, where she is currently teaching an advanced undergraduate course, "From Shell to Sankara: Geographies of Violence & Resistance Across Africa". Amber is the Associate Editor of a newly relaunched academic e-journal on Africa in the world, Africa World Review (to be launched in 2015), and has been published in a variety of academic journals, including Political Geography, Third World Quarterly, Human Geography, The Postcolonialist, Capital & Class and City. She contributes to a number of online forums, including Pambazuka News, Politics in Spires and Ceasefire Magazine.

I have research interests in postcolonial literature and theory, nationalism, multiculturalism and the literature of diaspora. I have published essays on Indian literature in English, Gandhi, gender politics in Indian nationalism, modern Arabic narrative genres, modern Islam and fundamentalism, and the politics of the Middle East. I am the author of four books: –Nationalism and Post-Colonial Identity: Culture and Ideology in India and Egypt (RoutledgeCurzon, 2003) –Amitav Ghosh (Manchester University Press, 2007) –Young British Muslim Voices (Greenwood, 2008) –Islam and Controversy: The Politics of Free Speech after Rushdie (Palgrave, 2014)

Tenured Research Assistant at English Language and Literature Department, Selçuk University (Turkey), and doctoral candidate in English Literature at Middle East Technical University (Turkey). She got her MA degree from Hacettepe University (Turkey) with a thesis entitled "The Self and the Other: Representations of Turkey and the Turks in the Travel Writings of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Richard Chandler" in 2006. She spent a year (April 2011-April 2012) as a visiting scholar at the University of Kent (Canterbury, UK), School of English, Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies. She has publications on Wole Soyinka, Olaudah Equiano, Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Arundhati Roy, Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill, Julia Pardoe, and so forth. She currently works on the Postcolonial Drama of Wole Soyinka. Her research interests include Travel Writing (especially about Ottoman Empire), Postcolonial Drama, Wole Soyinka, W.E.B. Du Bois, Literatures in English, and World Mythologies.