Department of English

My research attends to the psychic economy of colonial modernity in nineteenth-century anglophone literature, with emphasis on melancholia and opacity as vantage points for developing alternative modes of affinity that pertain to postcolonial struggles. Thinking beyond the enclosed, autonomous Enlightenment self and examining subject-formation as contingent on various forms of otherness that cannot be overcome, I explore Romantic and Victorian conceptions of unknowability, haunting, endings, reenactment, and their often queer incongruities with the empire (even while perpetuating imperialist projects). From here, I hope to touch on the queer postcolonial’s vexed relationship with cosmopolitan urges—feelings of exile/unbelonging, guilty attachments, complicity and trickster resistance. I also draw inspiration from scholarship on the AIDS Epidemic, rock music, and postsocialist cinema and literature.