Department of English

I am broadly interested in figures who use an idiom of spiritual self-work to present themselves as citizens of the world. My inquiries are based on how this simultaneous escape into the self and declaration of belonging to the world manifests itself in and as literary expression, translation, and adaptation. I am interested in tracking this idiom of self and world through various contexts of imperialism, including early modern England and modern South Asia. My dissertation project is interested in a particular kind of global thinking at the scene of 16th- and 17th-century British imperialism. This thinking, I argue, makes use of an idiom of self-work that eschews acquisitiveness while being enabled by the global imagination that is afforded, however violently, by empire.