Professor Radhika Mohanram
BA, MA English Literature (Madras), MA and PhD American Literature (Arizona)
Professor, English and Critical and Cultural Theory
- mohanramr1@cardiff.ac.uk
- +44 (0)29 2087 6151
- 1.30, John Percival Building, Colum Drive, Cardiff, CF10 3EU
Overview
My research is focussed in the areas of English Literature and Critical and Cultural Theory.
I research into, and teach about, postcolonial cultural studies, whiteness, gender and race, trauma, oral history, and South Asian Fiction.
Biography
My first job was in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies and the Department of English in The University of Waikato, New Zealand. I have worked in Cardiff University since September 2000.
Visiting Appointments at the University of Venice, Italy, University of Nantes, France, University of Auckland, New Zealand.
Journal Editorial Positions
- Editor, Social Semiotics (2001-current)
- Coeditor of SPAN (Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies), 1994-1999. (Issues 38-49)
- Editorial Board, New Literatures Review. (2003-current)
- Editorial Board, Journal of Postcolonial Writing (2005-current)
Publications
We are currently unable to retrieve the list of publications. Visit our institutional repository.Teaching
I teach the following modules at undergraduate level:
- Reading Postcolonial Fiction
- Fiction of the Indian Subcontinent
- Critical Theory 3: Postcolonial Theory
- Settler Identity: Fictions of OZ/NZ
and the following for postgraduates:
- White
- Postcolonial/Indigenous
I supervise two PhD students on topics such as Welsh Writing within the Framework of Whiteness and Women's Writing and the Discourse of Madness.
My research interests include postcolonial cultural studies, whiteness, gender and race, trauma, oral history, and South Asian Fiction.I am the Principal Investigator of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) project ‘The Afterlife of Violence’ (https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FS006400%2F1) which asks how the experience of violent civil war affects refugees who are forced to leave their homes and to establish a new life in very different society. How does such experience change people's sense of who they are and where they belong? How do they cope with the processes of adapting to a new environment and eventually becoming citizens of their new country? How does this experience become part of family memory across generations? The research team, which includes the National Museum of Wales, is exploring these questions by working with refugees at different stages of assimilation in Wales. Using in-depth life story interviews and participatory workshops, we are analysing memories of war, flight, asylum-seeking and settlement in Wales, and asking how these remembered experiences affect integration.
A co-edited collection of articles on the civil war and its affects will appear in the next two years.
Between 2013 and 2015 I was Principal Investigator on the AHRC Research Network, "Partitions: What are they good for?" (https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FK001949%2F1), and have recently published material on trauma, cultural memory, and the Indian Partition.
I am currently completing my monograph on the 1947 Indian Partition Forget to Remember; several chapters from this monograph have appeared as articles.
Postgraduate students
I would welcome applications from potential PhD students whose research interests intersect with mine or who work on postcolonial studies. Informal enquiries are also welcome.