Suvir Kaul (English, University of Pennsylvania)

Candidate statement

Suvir Kaul is A. M. Rosenthal Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He took B.A. (Honours), M.A., and M. Phil. Degrees from the University of Delhi before his Ph.D. from Cornell University (1986). He has taught at the SGTB Khalsa College of the University of Delhi, Cornell University, Stanford University, the Jamia Milia Islamia, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Campaign, where he was also the Director of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities. At Penn he has served as the Director the South Asia Center (2005-07) and as Chair of the English Department (2007-10). In Spring 2016, he was a Visiting Fellow at the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Advanced Study, Jawaharlal Nehru University.
He is the author of Of Gardens and Graves: Kashmir, Poetry, Politics (Duke University Press, 2017; New Delhi: Three Essays Collective, 2015); Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009); Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 2000; Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001) which won the Walker Cowen Prize; and of Thomas Gray and Literary Authority: Ideology and Poetics in Eighteenth-Century England (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992). He has edited The Partitions of Memory: the afterlife of the division of India (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001; London: C. Hurst, 2001; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), and co-edited (with Ania Loomba, Antoinette Burton, Matti Bunzl and Jed Esty), Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (Durham, Duke University Press, 2005; New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2005). He teaches and writes on eighteenth-century British literature and culture, South Asian writing in English, and critical theory, including postcolonial studies.