I teach at Universität Potsdam at the Institute for English and American Studies. The courses that I have taught at the university are mentioned below. Please click on the courses for more details.
Summer Semester 2024
Introduction to Cultural Studies
Course Details:
This was an introductory class for mostly incoming undergraduates at the Institute of English and American Studies. In this class, I taught the students concepts like representation, discourse, and postcolonialism in the weekly seminars where we read Edward Said, Stuart Hall, etc.
Jane Eyre: Postcolonial Readings of Race and Gender
Course Details:
Published as Jane Eyre: An Autobiography in 1847, Charlotte Brontë’s novel has been dissected by postcolonial critics for a very long time for its portrayal of Bertha Mason and for the way that characters have spoken about missionary work in India. In this class, I taught the text by engaging with the gothic setting of the novel and its use of mystery as being important to the characterisation of the “mad woman in the attic” who also happens to be from the Caribbean. The larger aim of the class was to read the gothic genre into the novel’s setting and contextualising it critically within the socio-political context of English colonialism.
Sherlock in Tibet: Revisiting the Mandala of Sherlock Holmes
Course Details:
Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous character Sherlock Holmes has been one of the most famous detectives in the history of fiction in a genre that has spawned other famous detectives like Miss Maple, Hercule Poirot (or even Batman?) among others. Yet, the fascination with Sherlock Holmes has persisted in the 21st century in the form of film and TV adaptations with famous actors like Benedict Cumberbatch playing the detective. In this course, I taught the “adaptation” of Holmes by a Tibetan writer who mingles the 19th century detective and brings in other famous characters to talk about Tibet and the Great Game. Could this be seen as a form of fan-fic? Or does adaptation of Sherlock create a different (textual) site of existence where Sherlock Holmes allows us to talk about colonialism?
Postcoloniali-Tea: Tracing Tea in the 19th Century
Course Details:
Tea is one of the most famous cultural “products” from England with the idea of English breakfast tea, among other forms, becoming synonymous with Englishness itself. In this class, I taught texts that engaged with the history of tea and how it came to fascinate various English businessmen and explorers in the 18th and 19th century by reading their travel writing. Primarily by reading the travelogues of English explorers and botanists who made explorations into “tea country” (in China), the question that we explored was this: What does reading these travelogues tell us about the global commodification of tea that shaped trade routes and empires?
Winter Semester 2023-2024
Introduction to Cultural Studies
Course Details:
This was an introductory class for mostly incoming undergraduates at the Institute of English and American Studies. In this class, I taught the students concepts like representation, discourse, and postcolonialism in the weekly seminars where we read Edward Said, Stuart Hall, etc.
Spies, Lies, Empire Ties: Postcolonial Readings of Lost Horizon
Course Details:
The novel Lost Horizon is an interesting intersection for many reasons: it was a novel that virtually created the idea of “Shangri-La” and it is also almost forgotten as a book even though it was one of the best selling books of its time. In this class, I taught the students this text by looking at the material history of this text (what is the history of the softcover bestseller?) and its more insidious use of Orientalist tropes in creating the idea of Shangri-La itself.
The Great Game(s): Re-Reading Rudyard Kipling’s Kim
Course Details: *uploading soon*
Summer Semester 2023
Bollywood + Shakespeare: Indian Reimaginations of Shakespeare
Course Details:
In this undergraduate course, I taught the intersection of William Shakespeare and Bollywood adaptation of Shakespeare. Since Shakespeare’s plays have been adapted and translated for an Indian audience with interesting results, this course dealt with questions of religion, caste, nationhood, etc. We compared Omkara (2006; adapted from Othello) and Haider (2014; adapted from Hamlet) to their original contexts and ask: what does a Bollywood film do to a Shakespearean tragedy and vice-versa? And what does such a translation do for us in the 21st century where Bollywood is seen as a larger representation of India?
Summer Semester 2022
Reading in the Age of Digital Humanities: Postcolonial Poetry in the Archives
Course Details:
In this undergraduate course, I introduced students to critical conversations in the field of digital humanities, seen through the perspective of postcolonial Indian poetry in English. In this course students read foundational texts (Introduction to Orientalism by Edward Said; excerpts from Leela Gandhi’s Postcolonialism) that discuss questions related to knowledge-production, postcolonial literature, and the formation of archives in the age of digitisation and digital humanities. Alongside this, the class also read a selection of Indian poems/zine issues in each class. We will use material from three zines: Vrishchik, Quest, and City Lights Journal. Basic data visualisation techniques (ezlinavis and Voyant) were also explored in the course of this class to “map” the way that poems worked with tools of digital humanities.