Dr Ananya Mishra, BA, MA, (EFLU) MPhil PhD (Cambridge)
Lecturer in Global Race Studies
Email: a.mishra@qmul.ac.uk
Profile
I grew up in Sambalpur (Odisha) and studied for my BA and MA at English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad (Telangana). I came to the U.K. initially to complete an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies, and then later a PhD in English at University of Cambridge with a Gates Trust (2014-2015) and Cambridge Trust Scholarship (2016-2021). I was a Visiting Student Researcher at Department of Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley between February-March 2018.
During my time at Cambridge, my work developed in the intersection of research on global Indigenous studies and creating alternative spaces for engaging with museums and performance. I am thrilled to live in east London as an educator and creative practitioner.
Teaching
UG:
- ESH126 London Global
- ESH293 The Long Contemporary
- ESH6027 After Postcolonialism
- ESH295 London: Walking the City
- ESH6000 Undergraduate Research Dissertations
PG:
- ESH7000 MA Dissertation
- ESH7001 Production of Texts in Context
Research
Research Interests:
- Adivasi, Australian and North American Indigenous Literatures
- Critical Indigenous Methods and Theory
- Climate Histories, The Anthropocene and Indigeneity
- Environmental/ Land Rights Movements and Song Cultures
- Colonial histories of art, ethnography, museums, and archives
Recent and On-Going Research:
I am interested in Indigenous, postcolonial and decolonial literatures, theory, archives, museums, and art practices. My work situates ideas of ‘evidence’ in global Indigenous histories, literary cultures, land rights, and climate justice movements from India, Australia, and North America. I am currently working on my monograph Evidentiary Literatures: Refusal and Resurgence in Global Indigenous Texts that reads the Indigenous literary text as evidentiary. I compare Adivasi, Australian and North American (US and Canada) First Nations writers and theorists to study Indigenous evidentiary discourse and its literary forms and their critique and refusal of colonial knowledge, histories of evidence collections and its afterlives. Theories and methods in Critical Indigenous Studies, Trans-Indigenous literary studies, Tribal Intellectual Collective India, inform my work in literary criticism. I am interested in studying Indigenous philosophies of the non-human/ more-than-human in literatures to trace local climate histories.
In collaboration with Centre for Indigenous and Settler Colonial Studies (CISCS), I co-organise Indigenous Theory and Method Reading Group. I co-convene Epistemologies of the Global South Research Group (EpiGloS) which seeks to foster, sustain, and encourage Black, Indigenous, and anti/de-colonial scholarship and coalitional thinking on theatre, performance, visual arts, and literatures from the Global South in the U.K through events, symposiums, workshops and writing days. I convened Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) conference on Climate Fictions/Indigenous Studies at University of Cambridge in 2020.
A significant part of my research is practise-based. This has involved co-creating projects to rethink museums and incubators for creatives (details in Performance and the Public Engagement sections). My work on museums attempts to connect research in literary criticism to public outreach. In 2018, I co-founded Untold Histories Museum Tours which brought new readings of museum collections and labels to the wider public to question colonial and racist narratives within museums. This project was based on research we conducted at Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA), University of Cambridge. In 2020, I co-organised the presentation of Natalie Harkin’s excerpt Archive Fever Paradox 2/ Whitewash Brainwash from her installation Archive Fever Paradox 2014 as part Climate Fictions/ Indigenous Studies for the wider public.
Publications
Selected writing:
- • Mishra, A. ‘Jami Chadiba Nahin (We Will Not Leave this Land): Materiality and Imagination in Indigenous Land Ethics’, New Area Studies, Vol. 4. No. 3 (2024), DOI: https://doi.org/10.37975/NAS.76.
-
Mishra A. (2022). The Crisis in Metaphors: Climate Vocabularies in Adivasi Literatures. Transmotion, 8(1), 129-175. https://doi.org/10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.983
-
Mishra, A. “Of Mountains and Seeds: Dambu Praska’s Poetry”, Cambridge University Press Open Engage, (2021), D O I: 10.33774/coe-2020-zhrpm; https://www.cambridge.org/engage/coe/article-details/5fac6ff1c207cd0019cb1141
- Mishra, A. “Lala Rukh’s Life and Legacy: A Panel Discussion”, Event Report, Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational, 2021, https://www.tate.org.uk/research/research-centres/hyundai-tate-research-centre-transnational/event-report-lala-rukh-life-legacy
- Suryanarayan A., Mishra, A. Parikh D. “Untold Histories Museum Tours”, Communicating Archaeology: Case Studies in the use of, and engagement with, archaeological collections, Society for Museum Archaeology, 2021. PDF. This resource is also available to download from the Collections Trust website: Communicating Archaeology – Collections Trust
- Mishra, A, Parikh D., Suryanarayan A. “Untold Histories Museum Tours: Stories of Collecting through Colonialism and Conflict” in University of Cambridge Museums and Botanic Garden Connecting Collections Blog, 9 January 2019, https://www.museums.cam.ac.uk/blog/2019/01/09/untold-histories-museum-tours-stories-of-collecting-through-colonialism-and-conflict/
- Parikh D., Mishra A., Suryanarayan A. “take hold: The research behind the Digital Encounter” in University of Cambridge Museums and Botanic Garden Connecting Collections Blog, 10 May 2018, https://www.museums.cam.ac.uk/blog/2018/05/10/take-hold-the-research-behind-the-digital-encounter/
Supervision
I would welcome enquiries from potential doctoral students interested in any of the areas of my research.
Public Engagement
Breaking Bread Workshops
Museum Outreach:
Untold Histories Museum Tours was based at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA), Cambridge between 2018 to 2019. I co-founded the tours along with Dr Akshyeta Suryanarayan and Dr Danika Parikh, following a successful pilot for the Festival of Ideas.
Details about the aims of the project from our case study written for Society of Museum Archaeology: “We hoped to decentre the focus on collectors in labels and consider the histories of the communities and original owners of the objects. Information on the latter was almost impossible to find given the nature of erasure both at the point of collection, and within archives. Therefore, we directed our efforts to critically examine the contexts through which objects came to be at the museum and to reveal the problematic pasts of figures who are still celebrated in the museum. The tours demonstrated how museums were products of colonialism, how they historically benefited from invasions, conquest and looting during conflict, and how they continue to benefit from colonial and neo-colonial practices while simultaneously erasing these violent histories through whitewashed narratives”.
Check Publications for more articles on the research behind Untold Histories Museum Tours.
Mentions:
- Outstanding Contribution to Education Award for Access and Outreach by Cambridge Centre for Teaching and Learning, University of Cambridge
- The New York Times: “Penguin Sex and Stolen Objects: Museum Tours Through a New Lens”.
Performance
I co-founded Bread Theatre and Film Company with Prof Suchitra Sebastian in 2019. It is an art & performance collective and incubator for creatives. We experiment with fresh ways of storytelling and genres to disrupt traditional narratives of power. We felt a need for a community like Bread when I was directing The Djinns of Eidgah, a play by Abhishek Majumdar, about characters caught between worlds in a conflict-torn Kashmir. The vision behind Bread was to create a space where more voices could tell more such stories. Bread Cambridge currently continues as a successful student-run society at University of Cambridge (I: Bread Cambridge).
Bread London (I: @bread_london) is an arts & performance collective and the London chapter of Bread Theatre and Film Company. It is started by Hannah Shury-Smith and Una McKeown together with us. Follow the Instagram handle (@bread_london) to know more about the kind of work we do and upcoming events.
Articles on Bread:
Mishra, A. “The Narrative and the Body”: https://www.varsity.co.uk/theatre/19398
Sebastian, S. “Bread Theatre and Film Company: Reimagining Spaces”: https://www.varsity.co.uk/theatre/19453
Interview: https://www.varsity.co.uk/theatre/18759
Alumna cover: https://magazine.alumni.cam.ac.uk/bread-is-for-everyone/
Selected performances:
Director and actor, The Djinns of Eidgah,
Edinburgh Fringe (2019)
Corpus Playroom (2018)
The Wee Review: https://theweereview.com/review/the-djinns-of-eidgah/
Lucy Writers’ Platform: https://lucywritersplatform.com/2018/12/15/review-of-the-djinns-of-eidgah-at-the-corpus-playroom-cambridge/
Full artist resume (available on request)