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
- Colloquium II
- 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
Books:
“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.
Articles and Book Chapters:
“Discursive Migrations: Romantic Aesthetics and Imperial History in the Black Hole of Calcutta” Comparative Literature 77:2 (2025): 168–187.
“Race and Gender in A Passage to India” in Harish Trivedi ed. 100 Years of A Passage to India. Hyderabad, Orient Blackswan, 2024.
“Colonial India and British Women Travelers” in Julie Carlson ed. The Cambridge History of Women and British Romanticism. Cambridge, Cambridge UP, date TBA.
“Ghalib’s Ghazals: An Aesthetic Refuge from Political Turmoil” in Arif Camoglu, Bakary Diaby, Omar Miranda, Gaura Narayan, and Kate Singer ed. The Routledge Handbook of Global Literature and Culture in the Romantic Era. London, Routledge, date TBA.
“Discursive Migrations: Romantic Aesthetics and Imperial History in the Black Hole of Calcutta.” Special issue of Comparative Literature on Sensing Migrant Romanticism, date TBA.
“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
“Hybridity, History, and Empire in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 60:1 (Spring 2018): 56-78.
“Phoolan Devi: Gendered Subaltern; Caste Warrior” Feminist Formations 30:2 (2018): 231-253.
Entry on Elizabeth’s Norman’s The Child of Woe in April London ed. The Cambridge Guide to the English Novel 1660-1820 Cambridge: Cambridge UP date and page numbers TBA.
“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.
“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.
Presentations / Conferences
“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? Negotiated Belonging in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire” at Hospitable Environments and Hostile Praxes Conference at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK, June 2025
“Hospitality and Hostility in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire: The Plight of the Muslim Immigrant in post 7/7 Britain” Annual Conference of the Association of Philosophy and Literature in Frankfurt, Germany, August 2025
“Allaying Panic and Writing Empire” ACLA Seminar on Sensing Romanticism, Chicago, March 2023
“Mustapha Sa’eed’s Tragic Resistance in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North” Annual International MLA Conference, January 2021.
“How Does Newness Enter the World?” Or, Indians Translated into English-Medium” accepted for the International GAPS conference in Frankfurt, May 2020. Conference cancelled on account of the COVID pandemic.
“Tear Down This Wall”: Borders, Limits, and National Belonging in South Asian Postcolonial Literature” Annual International MLA Conference, January 2020.
“Sisters Under the Skin: Rewriting the Other in Fantasia” Annual International MLA Conference, January 2020.
“Fact and Fiction in the Archives of the Indian Uprising of 1857” Annual International Narrative Conference in Pamplona, May 2019.
“The Speaking Dead in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire” Annual MLA International Symposium in Lisbon, July 2019.
“Home Fire / Antigone / Translation” Annual International MLA Conference, January 2019.
“Movable Types” Session Presider Annual International MLA Conference, January 2019.
“Oriental Splendor and Villainy in Vathek” Interdisciplinary Conference on Visualizing Theory at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, May 2018.
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 literature 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.