UoH Podcasts

Ira Raja teaches in the Department of English, University of Delhi. She is part of the Global Editorial Collective for the journal Postcolonial Studies.

In the ongoing Covidian Age, classic disease narratives from Daniel Defoe through Mary Shelley to Cormac McCarthy and Stephen King have made a comeback. Explorations of the Arts and Humanities in representing and critiquing pathologies, the "sick role" and medicine, with apocalyptic, extinction, pandemic and other scenarios have also resurfaced. It is in this context that the Dept. of English puts together this Podcast eSeries.

Peter Remien is an Associate Professor of English at Lewis-Clark State College in Idaho, USA. His recent book The Concept of Nature in Early Modern English Literature, published by Cambridge University Press, traces a genealogy of ecology in seventeenth-century literature and natural philosophy though the proto-ecological concept of “the oeconomy of nature.” His articles on economic and environmental issues in early modern literature have been published in a number of journals including PMLA, Modern Philology, Spenser Studies, Notes & Queries, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Studies in Philology, and Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. He is currently working with Scott Slovic on a co-edited collection focusing broadly on the uses of nature in literary studies and critical theory.

Coordinators: Anna Kurian & Pramod K Nayar

In the ongoing Covidian Age, classic disease narratives from Daniel Defoe through Mary Shelley to Cormac McCarthy and Stephen King have made a comeback. Explorations of the Arts and Humanities in representing and critiquing pathologies, the "sick role" and medicine, with apocalyptic, extinction, pandemic and other scenarios have also resurfaced. It is in this context that the Dept. of English puts together this Podcast eSeries.

Narrating Disease and Illness

By

Neeraja Sundaram, Azim Premji University

Neeraja Sundaram teaches Literature at the School of Arts and Sciences, Azim Premji University. At APU, she has developed and taught courses on literary criticism and theory, Romantic literature and foundation courses on reading and writing for undergraduates. Her research lies at the intersection of Literature and the Health Humanities and as such, focuses on questions of narrative and identity in the context of illness experience. As part of exploring connections between the story of a disease event in individuals and societies and a cultural transaction in meaning that occurs via its reception, she has worked on a range of media texts and forms but those of special interest remain the memoir, medical documentary and comics and graphic narrative.

She has published essays on the representation of the ailing celebrity body in contemporary media, questions of agency in fictional representations of the grotesque body, the epidemiological fiction of Octavia Butler, the emerging canon of physician-writers and epidemics in contemporary Hollywood. Her more recent work has focused on the medium of graphic novels and the perspective of caregivers with close attention to rights, precarity and gender as it emerges through narrative.

Brian Yothers is the Frances Spatz Leighton Endowed Distinguished Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English at the University of Texas at El Paso, USA. He is the author or editor of 13 books and special issues of journals, including Sacred Uncertainty: Religious Difference and the Shape of Melville’s Career, Reading Abolition: The Critical Reception of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass, and Melville’s Mirrors: Literary Criticism and America’s Most Elusive Author. He is also editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies.

Avishek Parui (PhD, Durham, UK) is Assistant Professor in English at IIT Madras and Associate Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy. His research interests include Memory Studies, Masculinity Studies, and Medical Humanities. He is the author of Postmodern Literatures (Orient Blackswan, 2018) and is currently contracted with Rowman & Littlefield for his second book titled Culture and the Literary: Matter, Metaphor, Memory.

In the ongoing Covidian Age, classic disease narratives from Daniel Defoe through Mary Shelley to Cormac McCarthy and Stephen King have made a comeback. Explorations of the Arts and Humanities in representing and critiquing pathologies, the "sick role" and medicine, with apocalyptic, extinction, pandemic and other scenarios have also resurfaced. It is in this context that the Dept. of English puts together this Podcast eSeries.

Nandana Dutta is Director, Gauhati University Institute of North East India Studies and Professor in the English Department. She specialises in American Literature, Postcolonial Theory and Literature, Women's Studies, Literary and Cultural Theory, and is the author of American Literature (2016), Questions of Identity in Assam: Location, Migration, Hybridity (2012), the editor of Communities of Women in Assam: Being, Doing and Thinking Together (2016), besides essays in English, Interventions, Commonwealth: Essays and Studies, Synthesis, Australia Literary Studies, The Global South, and other journals.