Gaura Narayan
Associate Professor of Literature
Gaura Narayan, Associate Professor, in the Literature department at Purchase College SUNY, received her PhD from Columbia University in May 1998. Her book, Real and Imagined Women in British Romanticism (Peter Lang 2010) historicizes the functioning of gender in Romanticism. She has also contributed a book chapter on “Lost Beginnings in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight Children” to Brian Richardson ed. Narrative Beginnings (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), an article on “Imperiled Women and Chivalrous Men in Colonial India 1757-1857” in the South Asian Review’s special issue on Gender and Sexuality, and other forthcoming articles on Rudyard Kipling and Phoolan Devi. Her current book project combines her scholarly interests in Romanticism and India by focusing on the construction of India in the British imagination during the first phase of imperialism in India (1757-1857).
She teaches courses in the British eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and also in colonial and postcolonial South-Asian literature and culture. Her teaching and her research are driven by the very simple observation that Britain was the preeminent global power in the nineteenth century and as such its language, literature, and public discourse shaped and was shaped by its imperial possessions. Her work as a teacher and as a scholar in the aftermath of events like 9/11, extends the question about imperial Britain and asks students to reflect on the nature of influence and the constantly shifting nature of power and authority – official and cultural – in the long and fraught relationship between the West and the non-West.
More About Me
Research Interests
Research interests are British Romanticism; postcolonial literature and culture; gender studies; narrative theory.
Representative Courses
- Colloquium I
- ColloquiumII
- Romanticism I
- Romanticism II
- 19th Century British Literature and Empire
- Victorian Poetry
- Romanticism and Modernism
- Gothic
- Survey of British Literature
- Literature of Decolonization in South Asia
- Literature of the South Asian Diaspora
- South Asian Literature
- Twentieth Century World Literature
- Introduction to Literature
- Only Connect: Difference and Otherness in Literature
- Literature of Disruption
- 20th Century South Asian Literature and History
Publications
“Postcolonial Reckonings of Romanticism and Empire: Language of Power, Fictions of Authority.” Book in progress.
Real and Imagined Women in British Romanticism Nineteenth-Century Literature Series. New York: Peter Lang Publishing Group. 2010.
“Imperiled Women and Chivalrous Men in Colonial India, 1757-1857” South Asian Review 34.3 (2013): 35-52.
“Lost Beginnings in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children” in Brian Richardson ed. Narrative Beginnings Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2008: 137-148.
“Hybridity, History, and Empire in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim” forthcoming (Spring 2018) in Texas Studies in Language and Literature.
“Sex and Literary History in Orlando” in Jane de Gay, Tom Breckin and Anne Reus eds. Virginia Woolf and Heritage: Selected Papers form the 26th Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf Clemson: Clemson UP, 2017: 128-133.
“Phoolan Devi: Gendered Subaltern; Caste Warrior” forthcoming (2018) in Feminist Formations.
Entry on The Child of Woe: A Novel by Elizabeth Norman (1789) ed. April London. The Cambridge Guide to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 1660-1820 Cambridge: Cambridge UP, tbd.
“Imperial Powers and Subaltern Voices” in Jane Kromm ed. Encyclopedia of Visual Culture Volume 1.London, Bloomsbury, TBA
““Tear Down This Wall”: Borders, Limits, and National Belonging in South Asian Postcolonial Literature” in Kate Rose ed. Displaced: Literature of Indigeneity, Migration, and Trauma. New York: Routledge. 2020: 22-38.
“The Skull of Alum Bheg” invited submission to virtual roundtable hosted by Chapati Mystery:
https://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/cm_roundtable_iii_the_skull_of_alum_bheg_narayan.html
Presentations / Conferences
Organized collaborative panel on “South-Asia and Romanticism” jointly sponsored by the Keats-Shelley Association of America and the Language, Literature, and Culture Forum on South Asian and South Asian Diasporic literaure for the Annual International MLA Conference in January 2018.
“Monstrous South-Asia in Robert Southey’s The Curse of Kehama” accepted for the Annual International MLA Conference in January 2018.
“Tear Down This Wall”: Borders, Limits, and National Belonging in South Asian Postcolonial Literature” accepted for the Postcolonial Studies Association Convention in London, September 2017.
“Making History in the Black Hole of Calcutta” Annual International Narrative Conference in Lexington, March 2017.
“Hunger, Plenitude, and the Imperial Divide” Annual International MLA Conference in January 2017.
“Narrative Desire and National Identity” Annual International Narrative Conference in
Amsterdam, June 2016.
“Sex and History in Orlando” Annual International Virginia Woolf Conference at Trinity University, Leeds, England, June 2016.
“Performance, Empire, and Narrative in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim” Annual Comparative Literature Symposium at Texas Tech University, April 2015 .
“Everywhere and Invisible: Sexual Oppression of Lower-Caste Women in Rural India” Annual International MLA Conference in Vancouver, January 2015.
“Ayah Un-homed: Sexual Subjugation and Silence in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India” Annual International MLA Convention in Chicago, January 2014.
“Narrative Arrangement and Radical Politics in The God of Small Things” Annual Conference of the South Asian Literary Association in Chicago, January 2014.
“Sons and Daughters of Ham in Vilayet (London)” Annual Conference of the South Asian Literary Association in Boston, January 2013.
“Hastings, Burke and a Deferred Denouement” Annual Conference of the South Asian Literary Association in Seattle, January 2012.
“Lost Beginnings in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children” Annual International MLA Convention in Philadelphia, December 2004. Presiding: Brian Richardson.
“Wordsworth and Keats: Dynamic Engagements” Annual International MLA Convention in New York, December 2002. Presiding: Sonia Hofkosh. Respondent: Morton D. Paley.
“Transplanting the Daffodils in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy” Annual International Narrative Conference, April 2000.
“Custodians of the Empire in Anita Desai’s In Custody” Annual International Narrative Conference, April 1999.
“World Extension in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” American Conference on Romanticism, October 1998.
“Writing the Self and Writing the Nation” Annual International Narrative Conference, April 1998.
“Psychoanalysis, Narrative, and a Story Untold in Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’” American Conference on Romanticism, October 1996.
“Gender and Poetic Inheritance in Keats’s Odes” American Conference on Romanticism, September 1995.
“Perceiving the Perceiver: Blake, Hume, and Gender Identity in Milton” Northeast MLA, April 1992.