Assistant Professor

Office No: 45, Arts Faculty Building, University of Delhi, North Campus

Preferred Contact hours: By appointment

E: mail: swetha.antony.p@gmail.com

PhD (The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad), MA (University of Kerala 2008), BA (University of Kerala 2006)

 

Statement:

Swetha Antony is a generalist whose fingers are dipped in multiple fields of literature and humanities. She has a PhD in English Literature from The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, India. Her doctoral research work on the poetry of Kamala Das is broadly oriented towards postcolonial theory and literatures, with special focus on the language question and the theories of Cosmopolitanism. The poetics of exile as articulated by writers in the spectrum of New Literatures in English continues to fascinate her. Her papers on Kamala Das and post colonial literatures have been published in various edited volumes and journals. She has forayed into the tantalizing area of food studies by co-editing with Elizabeth M. Schmidt the volume Beyond the Superficial: Making Sense of Food in a Globalized World, Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press (2016). She has delivered various talks focusing on the paradigms of critical food studies within English Studies in India. The notion of third culture/third space in contemporary literature and popular culture is also an overarching critical context of her work with respect to her engagement with Food Studies, Film Studies, Visuality Studies, Kerala Studies, Sports Studies, Disability Studies, and Environmental Humanities. Her ongoing research is on the larger impact of Portuguese colonialism and the origin and evolution of the Latin Catholic community in Kerala, which has led to her engagement with the relationship between art, literature and environment. She is currently exploring the concept of tiNai to understand the presence of geographical spaces in the literary, cultural, and performative traditions of the coastal belt of South India. Her most recent academic collaborations involve her engagement with Medical Humanities through the translation of Sheeba E K’s Malayalam short story “Surgeon” for the anthology Medical Maladies: Stories of Disease and Cure from Indian Languages, Niyogi Books (2022) edited and introduced by Haris Qadeer. She is also a research affiliate for the project on ADHD Graphic Medical Narratives with Indiana University, Southeast New Albany, USA. (8 November 2022 – 31 December 2023) which led to her engagement with Graphic Medicine. As an extension of this work, she is currently exploring the notion of menstrualscape and the discursive practices of colour. She is currently focusing on the possibilities of drawing up academic boundaries through the concept of Pink Humanities. She works as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, University of Delhi.

Areas of Interest/ Research:

Kamala Das Studies, Indian Poetry in English, Global Literature, Theories of the Diaspora, Cosmopolitanism and Third Space/Culture, Film Criticism, Environmental Humanities 

Courses Taught:

MA: 

Eighteenth Century British Literature, British Romantic Poetry, Twentieth Century Poetry and Drama, Literature and Gender, New Literatures in English, American Literature, Ancient Greek and Latin Literature in Translation, and Literature and the Visual Arts in Europe. 

Representative Publications:

Books (Edited)

Beyond the Superficial: Making Sense of Food in a Globalized World, Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2016. (edited with Elizabeth M. Schmidt)

Chapters in Books

“Transcending the (Generic) Self: Liminality in Merrily Weisbord’s The Love Queen of Malabar: Memoir of a Friendship with Kamala Das”, Explorations in Critical Humanities: A Collection of Essays (ed.)Sreenath Muraleedharan K and Devi K, India: Viva Books, 2017.

“Introduction”, (co-authored with Elizabeth M. Schmidt) Beyond the Superficial: Making Sense of Food in a Globalized World, Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2016. 

“Self as a Trace in Postcolonial Discourse: An Analysis of Kamala Das’ Poetry”, Gender and Commonwealth Studies (ed) Anuradha Kunda and Arnab Bhattacharya, Kolkata: Books Way, 2015.

“The Soul that Knows How to Sing: A Post Structuralist Analysis of Kamala Das’s Poetry”, Indian Poetry in English: Critical Essays (ed) Zinia Mitra, New Delhi: PHI Learning Private Limited, 2012. 

Articles:

 “Ventriloquing the Vernacular: the Contexts to Indian English Writing” in the peer reviewed journal International Proceedings of Economics Development and Research: Language, Medias and Culture (Vol 33) Ed: by Feng Tao published by IACSIT Press, Singapore. 

“Identity as a Skein of Memory, History and Violence in Micheal Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost.” Literary Quest, Volume 1 Issue 11, April 2015

Youtube links