Anindya Raychaudhuri

Biography

Anindya Raychaudhuri is a Lecturer in English. He was previously British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, first at UCL and subsequently at the School of English, University of St Andrews. He was awarded an MA in Issues in Modern Culture at UCL in 2006, and completed his PhD in 2010 at Cardiff University, on gender and memory in representations of the Spanish Civil War, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. He has taught at Cardiff University and the University of Glamorgan and his teaching interests include literary theory, representations of war, comparative literature and film studies.

Research Interest

His primary research interest is in the cultural representation and collective memory of war and conflict. He is also interested in postcolonial and diasporic identities and cultures. He is currently working on two main projects: Narrating Partition: Agency, Memory, Representation This brings together “private” and “public” forms of memory narratives of the 1947 Indian/Pakistani partition, by looking at oral history testimonies and cultural production of partition in the form of literature, cinema and visual art. Through analysis of these memory-narratives across a number of different genres, the project examines how agency is articulated and contested in the ways in which these texts and the memories they are based on are narrated. Postcolonial Nostalgia and the Construction of a South Asian Diaspora This project examines the role played by nostalgia in the ways in which diasporic South-Asians construct their individual and collective identity and argues that in the postcolonial context, this affect of nostalgia needs to be seen as potentially radical. Through studying literature, film, television and visual culture, architecture, real and virtual public spaces, as well as ethnographic interviews, the project will demonstrate the role nostalgia has to play in all of these different areas.