Dr. Sharmani Patricia D/o Thomas Gabriel

Biography

Sharmani Patricia Gabriel is Professor and Head of the Department of English, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Universiti Malaya.  Her research is situated at the intersections of literary studies, postcolonial theory, and cultural studies, with particular interests in the cultural politics of identity, diaspora, migration, transnationalism, and  multiculturalism in Malaysian, British Asian, and Asian American literatures. She is the recipient of various awards, including the Commonwealth Academic Staff Scholarship Award, which she took up at the University of Leeds, UK, and Fulbright Fellowships at the University of Northern Illinois and University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, USA, where, in addition to conducting research, she also introduced and taught a postgraduate course on Malaysian Literature in English. She has participated in international research projects and her work has appeared in leading peer-reviewed journals such as Ethnic and Racial Studies, Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, Critical Asian Studies, Ethnicities, Cultural Dynamics, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Postcolonial Text, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, ARIEL, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Canadian Literature, and Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. She has also co-edited and contributed to special issues of journals. Her co-edited book publications include  Diasporic Identities and Spaces Between (Inter-Disciplinary Press: Oxford, UK, 2012) and Cosmopolitan Asia: Littoral Epistemologies of the Global South (Routledge: London & New York, 2016). She is Editor-in-Chief of SARE: Southeast Asian Review of English and serves on the editorial board of the Cambridge University Press journal, TRaNS: Trans-Regional and National Studies of Southeast Asia, and ASIATIC: An International Journal of Asian Literatures, Cultures and Englishes. She is also on the Editorial Committee of Rowman & Littlefield International’s Book Series on “Asian Cultural Studies: Transnational and Dialogic Approaches” and on the International Advisory Board of eTropic: Electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics.  She has forthcoming a co-edited volume under contract for Palgrave-Macmillan titled Literature, Memory, Hegemony: East/West Crossings and a chapter on "History, Memory, and Cultural Identity in the Novel of Malaysia and Singapore" in The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 10 (Oxford University Press, 2018). Sharmani has been invited to present talks and keynote lectures at events within and beyond Malaysia, including Indonesia, Spain, India, Australia, and the USA.

Research Interest

Postcolonial Literary and Cultural Studies (in particular Malaysian, Asian-American and British-Asian literatures; diasporic and transnational writings; cosmopolitanism; cultural translation; critical theory, cultural globalization)