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Udaya Kumar

Udaya Kumar

Udaya Kumar
Udaya Kumar
Professor
Centre/School/Special Centre
Centre for English Studies,
School of Language Literature and Culture Studies
Room No
151, SLL&CS-I
Off. Phone
+91-11-26738977, 26708935
Email
udayakumar@mail.jnu.ac.in , udayaxkumar@gmail.com
Personal Webpage
http://www.jnu.ac.in/Faculty/udayakumar/cv.pdf
Qualifications

BA (Kerala), MA (Kerala), DPhil (Oxon) 

Areas of Interest/Specialization

Autobiographical writing; Death and contemporary culture; Emotions and political life; Literary and cultural theory; Modern Indian writing, especially from Kerala; Cultural histories of the body, Idioms of vernacular social thought; and Modern literary cultures and questions of publicness.

Experience

Centre for English Studies, JNU (October 2015- )
Department of English, Delhi University (1997-2015)
Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (2005-8)
Indian Institute of Advanced Study (1995-7)
University of Pune (1988-9; 1991-2) 

Awards & Honours

Senior Fellow, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (2012-14)
Leverhulme Visiting Professor, Newcastle University (2009-10)

International Collaboration/Consultancy
Member, Editorial Advisory Board, Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism (2011- )
Member, Leverhulme Research Network on Postcolonial Translation (2009-11) 
Best Peer Reviewed Publications (upto 5)

Book:

Writing the First Person: Literature, History and Autobiography in Modern Kerala. Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2016.

The Joycean Labyrinth: Repetition, Time and Tradition in `Ulysses'.  Oxford: Clarendon Press, October 1991, rpt. 2001.

Papers:

‘Choosing a Tongue, Choosing a Form: Kamala Das’s Bilingual Algorithms,’ in Rosella Ciocca and Neelam Srivastava, eds., Indian Literature and the World: Multilingualism, Translation and the Public Sphere (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 87-102.

 ‘The Strange Homeliness of the Night: Spectral Speech and the Dalit Present in C. Ayyappan's Writings,’ Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences, XVII: 1 and 2 (2010, pub. 2013) pp. 177-91.

 ‘Self, Body and Inner Sense: Some Observations on Sree Narayana Guru and Kumaran Asan’, Studies in History, vol. 13, no. 2 (July-December 1997), pp. 247-70. Reprinted in The Indian Postcolonial, eds. Elleka Boehmer and Rosinka Chaudhuri (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 214-37.

Recent Peer Reviewed Journals/Books (upto 3)

‘Life, Resistance and Resignation: Testimonial Lessons of Dispossession,’ in Displacement and Citizenship: Histories and Memories of Exclusion, eds. Vijaya Rao, Shambhavi Prakash, Mallarika Sinha Roy, and Papori Bora (New Delhi: Tulika Press, 2020), pp. 1-20.

‘The Perfect Imperfect: Democracy and the Ethics of Self-ruination,” Cultural Critique, 105 (Fall 2019), pp. 223-39.

‘The Legibility of Things: Objects and Public Histories in N. S. Madhavan’s Litanies of Dutch Battery,’ in Narratology and Ideology: Encounters between Narrative Theory and Postcolonial Criticism, eds. Divya Dwivedi, Henrik Skov Nielsen & Richard Walsh (Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2018), pp. 74-90.

‘Sovereignty, Allegory and Political Affect: K. Narayana Kurukkal’s Novels,’ in Novel Formations: The Indian Beginnings of a European Genre, eds. Baidik Bhattacharya and Sambudha Sen (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2018), pp. 167-210.

A warm welcome to the modified and updated website of the Centre for East Asian Studies. The East Asian region has been at the forefront of several path-breaking changes since 1970s beginning with the redefining the development architecture with its State-led development model besides emerging as a major region in the global politics and a key hub of the sophisticated technologies. The Centre is one of the thirteen Centres of the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi that provides a holistic understanding of the region.

Initially, established as a Centre for Chinese and Japanese Studies, it subsequently grew to include Korean Studies as well. At present there are eight faculty members in the Centre. Several distinguished faculty who have now retired include the late Prof. Gargi Dutt, Prof. P.A.N. Murthy, Prof. G.P. Deshpande, Dr. Nranarayan Das, Prof. R.R. Krishnan and Prof. K.V. Kesavan. Besides, Dr. Madhu Bhalla served at the Centre in Chinese Studies Programme during 1994-2006. In addition, Ms. Kamlesh Jain and Dr. M. M. Kunju served the Centre as the Documentation Officers in Chinese and Japanese Studies respectively.

The academic curriculum covers both modern and contemporary facets of East Asia as each scholar specializes in an area of his/her interest in the region. The integrated course involves two semesters of classes at the M. Phil programme and a dissertation for the M. Phil and a thesis for Ph. D programme respectively. The central objective is to impart an interdisciplinary knowledge and understanding of history, foreign policy, government and politics, society and culture and political economy of the respective areas. Students can explore new and emerging themes such as East Asian regionalism, the evolving East Asian Community, the rise of China, resurgence of Japan and the prospects for reunification of the Korean peninsula. Additionally, the Centre lays great emphasis on the building of language skills. The background of scholars includes mostly from the social science disciplines; History, Political Science, Economics, Sociology, International Relations and language.

Several students of the centre have been recipients of prestigious research fellowships awarded by Japan Foundation, Mombusho (Ministry of Education, Government of Japan), Saburo Okita Memorial Fellowship, Nippon Foundation, Korea Foundation, Nehru Memorial Fellowship, and Fellowship from the Chinese and Taiwanese Governments. Besides, students from Japan receive fellowship from the Indian Council of Cultural Relations.