Professor Javed Majeed

Biography

"From 1981 to 1984 Professor Javed Majeed read English Language and Literature at Magdalen College Oxford, in which he was awarded a First. After completing his DPhil at Oxford, he went on to a Smuts Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge, and a Research Fellowship in English Literature at Churchill College Cambridge from 1988 to 1992. The interdisciplinary combination of Area Studies with English Literature continues to inform his teaching and research. After teaching Comparative Literature and Urdu at SOAS, he moved to the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London, in 1999, where he became Professor of Postcolonial Studies in 2007. He joined King’s College London as Professor of English and Comparative Literature in January 2012. Javed Majeed is currently writing a book on the Linguistic Survey of India, conducted by the colonial state under the supervision of Sir George Abraham Grierson (1851-1941) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In this ongoing work, he addresses the themes of the territorialisation of India as a linguistic entity, the presence of ‘native’ voices in the colonial archive, the role of uncertainty in the creation of linguistic knowledge and classification, and the complex relationships between imperial ideologies and the production of knowledge in British India. He has an additional research interest in the cultural politics of lexicography in English, Urdu and Persian in 19th century India, on which he has a number of forthcoming essays in edited books and one published article. Javed is interested in supervising PhD topics in any of his areas of interest."

Research Interest

"Colonial and postcolonial literatures in English; Intellectual and cultural history of British India and postcolonial South Asia; Religion, colonialism and postcolonialism; Urdu literature, especially poetry; Linguistic ideas, language and translation in colonial and postcolonial South Asia"