Please join us in welcoming two new professors to our department this fall: Aditya Bahl and Aliya Ram. Both were profiled in a recent Humanities article. See their blurb below and read about other faculty joining the Humanities division this year at the link here.
Aditya Bahl, works at the intersections of literary studies, political economy and anthropology, with a particular interest in the longue durée of South Asia. His current project recovers the lost fragments of small and underground magazines published in Punjab (India) during the Cold War. Against a global backdrop of U.S.-Sino-Soviet confrontations, it traces how a fugitive laboratory of world literature came to surface in a postcolonial landscape dotted with seed farms, literary contact zones and prisons. He plans to teach courses on ghazals, Marx, love, Bombay and colonialism.
Aliya Ram, studies the connections between social coercion and aesthetic innovation, especially in the modern literatures and cultures of the Global South. She is currently working on one project on literary address and another on the emergence of the refugee as an exemplary narrator. Her research centers the complexities of social identity, narratability and intersubjectivity as illuminated by acts of linguistic concealment. She will teach courses such as Narrating the Refugee; Other Englishes; Non-Reproductive Futures; and Opacity, Ambiguity, Misdirection. Ram is on leave for the 2025–26 academic year.
Photo caption: Joining the English faculty this fall are (from left to right) Aditya Bahl and Aliya Ram.