Teaching

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.