Anjana Sharma

Biography

My Ph.D. in English Literature from The Pennsylvania State University–British Jacobin women novelists of the post Revolutionary period of the 1790s–was part of the ground breaking research in the ways the period had been canonically defined for almost two centuries. My own research model was in large part defined by the steady reconfiguration of the ways in which ideas of feminist academic discourse had begun to re look at ideas of genre, gender and hegemony. I was literally “growing up” on the ways in which the then new feminist scholarship (of the late 1970s and early 1980s) queried what we read, why we read it and what were “taught” to privileging as literary and non-literary. My doctoral thesis (lAutobiography of Desire: English Jacobin Women Novelists of the 1790s, Macmillan, 2004) contested the idea of the hegemony of the works of the six canonical, Romantic male poets despite the rich and diverse range of literary formulations being produced, circulated and consumed in post Revolutionary England. The exploration of the works of the Jacobin women writers of the 1790s then flowed into my teaching and later publication of a volume of critical essays on what I see as a critique of the model of the masculine Romanticism in the seminal text by Mary Shelley: Frankenstein: Interrogating Gender, Culture and Identity (Macmillan, 2004). These concerns govern the methodology of the MPhil Course I now teach at the Department on Revolutionary Aesthetics and the Public/Private Sphere in England from 1760-1800. I have also consistently worked with and published on the area of on Indian Writing in English with a special focus on gender and culture. Another area of critical inquiry that developed over the many years of teaching undergraduates and post graduates Classical literature was the cross cultural examination of the idea of the same that gave shape to a collaborative work with an Australian Scholar, the late Professor Terry Collits of La Trobe University entitled Agamemnon’s Mask: Greek Tragedy and Beyond (Macmillan, 2007). My current research-a collaboration with a sociologist, Dr. Gopa Sabharwal (Lady Shri Ram College for Women) is a two part book deal on the year 1947 in English language newspapers and the “public” representation of M.K. Gandhi in the year 1947-48. Both works are commissioned by Penguin India. Theoretically we have brought together in this enterprise a direct model of inter disciplinarity. In addition, it also combines my earliest commitment to archival research and the politics of telling the story that is very often in resistance to received accounts of what constitutes an era and the consequent choice of what mode of narrative will be used to inscribe it within an emergent culture.

Research Interest

My own research model was in large part defined by the steady reconfiguration of the ways in which ideas of feminist academic discourse had begun to re look at ideas of genre, gender and hegemony.