Research Project
Project Title: (Un)worlding Now: The Unsettling Imaginaries of Contemporary Speculative Fiction from the Global South
This research project contends that speculative fiction is not just an aesthetic category, but also an active practice of unsettling normative conceptions of reality. I argue that speculative fiction accomplishes this unsettling via narrative world-building that pushes and breaks the bounds of accepted reality. I call this dual practice of world-building and world-breaking (un)worlding. Joining a rich tradition of thinkers who interrogate liberal humanist conceptions of Man, the speculative (un)worlding this project traces unsettles a global order that takes white, male, heterosexual, financially secure, Global North-dwelling individuals as the aspirational ideal. The project’s archive draws together South Asian, Caribbean, SWANA, African, Latin American, and Indigenous contemporary speculative fiction in English and Hindi in order to establish the operations and possibilities of speculative fiction’s (un)worlding by highlighting the genre’s capacity to disrupt crucial fundamentals like spacetime, love and desire, notions of reality, and the line between fact and fiction. By reading texts like Ibtisam Azem’s The Book of Disappearance (2019), S. Hareesh’s Moustache (2020), Usman Malik’s Midnight Doorways (2021), and Leone Ross’s Popisho (2021), the project posits how speculative fiction’s formal experiments with temporal loops, shifting geographies, and cross-species entanglements illuminate the hidden logics undergirding dominant social orders while also opening up alternative visions of borders, belonging, kinship, and cause-and-effect. Apart from literary criticism, I interview speculative fiction writers and readers to interrogate how they engage with the genre’s (un)worlding. Bringing together such linked, but differentially situated, contexts—from interviews to Global South-spanning speculative fiction—allows me to engage in a relational comparative study that responds to both the ethical and epistemic imperatives of the global humanities after Man. Ultimately, this project makes a dual intervention: it situates speculative fiction as a genre central to the emergent global humanities while also arguing that the genre’s capacity to shift “what is” in favor of “what if” makes it a potent critical-creative site for fields of critical social theory that insist on reimagining dominant ways of relating, such as decolonial studies, migration studies, complex systems thinking, and queer theory.
Research Interests
- Aesthetics and politics
- Speculative aesthetics
- Decolonial Studies
- Gender and Sexuality Studies
- Complex Systems Science
Curriculum Vitae (CV)
Education
2025: Ph.D., English Language and Literature; University of Virginia, U.S.A.
Women, Gender, and Sexuality Graduate Certificate
Dissertation: “Speculative (Un)worldings: The Many Worlds of Caribbean and South Asian Speculative Fiction”
Committee: Dr. Rita Felski (chair), Dr. Mrinalini Chakravorty, Dr. Njelle Hamilton, Dr. Lawrie Balfour
2021: M.A., English Language and Literature; University of Virginia, U.S.A.
2018: M.A., Liberal Studies (Honors), Concentration: English; Ashoka University, India
2016: B.A., English and Economics; St. Xavier’s College, India
Academic appointments
2025 – 2026: Visiting Teaching Professor, Department of English, Northeastern University
Awards, Grants, and Fellowships
2024: Graduate Global Research Grant, Center for Global Inquiry and Innovation, University of Virginia
2024: All-University Graduate Teaching Award, University of Virginia
2021, 2022, 2023, 2024: Summer Research Grant, University of Virginia
2022: Americas Center/Centro de las Américas Research Grant, University of Virginia
2021 – 2022: Praxis Fellowship (Digital Humanities Fellowship), Scholars’ Lab, University of Virginia
2020 – 2021: Democracy Initiative Graduate Seminar Fellowship: “Democracy, War, and Violence,” University of Virginia
2017: Outstanding Project Award for work with New Delhi’s Education Department, Ashoka University
2016: Smt. Kusumben Mathradas Kothari Merit Scholarship of INR 1,00,000, Ashoka University
Selected Conference and Workshop Activity
Conferences & Panels Organized
- Co-Chair, Session: “Precarious Paradigms,” American Studies Association, Baltimore; 2024
- Co-Chair, GradCon: Networks, 3-day English Department Graduate Conference, University of Virginia; 2022
- Presentations
- “Navigating Tense Classrooms,” Writing and Rhetoric Program, University of Virginia (by invite); 2024
- “Fantastic Sense-Making: What Fantasy Tells Us About Being Human,” Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association, Palm Springs; 2024
- “Transitions and Multiples: The Spacetime-body Complex and Tense Realities in Rita Indiana’s Tentacle,” Annual Conference on West Indian Literature, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago (cancelled due to Hurricane Milton); 2024
- “Uncertainty and Speculative Fiction: Risky Relationships, Precarious Modalities in Leone Ross’s Popisho,“ American Comparative Literature Association, Chicago; 2023
- “A Matter of Time(s), A Matter of Silence(s): Regendering Temporality in Shashi Deshpande’s Works,” GradCon, University of Virginia; 2020
Institutes and Workshops
- The Institute for World Literature, Harvard University; 2023
- c3Design, Course Design Workshop, Center for Teaching Excellence, University of Virginia; 2023
- School of Criticism and Theory, Cornell University; 2022
- Comparative/World/Global: A Book Workshop Series, Asian Cosmopolitans Lab, University of Virginia; 2021
- Podcasting the Humanities Workshop, National Humanities Center; 2021
- Summer Institute for Engaged Learning, Jefferson Trust, University of Virginia; 2020
Publications
Peer-Reviewed Articles
“Loving the Self, Imagining Otherwise: A Case for Self-Love and its Speculative Possibilities,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 51.3 (2026): 731-752.
Academic Reviews
Review of Britta Maria Colligs’ Material Ecocriticism and Sylvan Agency in Speculative Fiction: The Forests of the World. Extrapolation 66.3 (2025): 341-45.
Public-Facing Writing
The Hindu - national newspaper, Mumbai, India (Published 8 articles in the newspaper’s print and online edition); 2015