Shital Pravinchandra, BA, MA, PhD (Cornell)
Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature
Email: s.pravinchandra@qmul.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0)20 7882 5738
Room Number: Arts One 1.19B
Office Hours: Mondays 1-2pm and Tuesdays 12-1pm
Profile
I have two main research interests: postcolonial studies’ intersections with the health humanities and the short story as a global literary form. My current book project is contracted with Bloomsbury Academic’s Explorations in Science and Literature series, and is entitled Longevity Fictions: Literature, Biomedical Science, and Postcolonial Critique. Reading medical and scientific writing alongside literary texts, the book shows how developments in the biomedical sciences have created new iterations of colonialism, which are problematically presented as desirable because their stated aim is to produce human health and longevity. I argue that such developments ultimately generate new ways of laying claim to and disciplining the bodies of Black, Brown and Indigenous people.
My future research projects will explore the popularity of the short story in South Asian regional-language literatures, and the contrasting dominance of the novel in Anglophone South Asian writing.
I have previously taught at SOAS and at Yale, and here at QM I teach core modules in Comparative Literature and also offer courses based on my research, such as “Literatures of the Postcolonial World” and “Medicine and Ethics in Contemporary Global Literature.”
I convene the department’s iBSc in Global Medical Humanities, and co-chair the Health and Humanities Research Forum, which I co-founded.
I co-edit the Routledge book series Global Literatures: Twenty-First Century Perspectives and the journal Literature, Critique and Empire Today (formerly the Journal of Commonwealth Literature).