What the text?! Mapping the world in literature.

Before the politicisation of social media, there were literary magazines! In post-1947 India, they were literally shaping ideas on citizenship and defining who should belong to the newly created nation. Drawing from my research in India’s Northeastern region, I’ll be showing how literary magazines became political staging grounds for their readers and enabled them to restrict participation in a new Indian literary and national culture to particular ethnic and linguistic groups.

How do the stories we tell help to shape our society? And why are we still fascinated by myth in an age where Science rules supreme? From re-imaginings of ancient myths to the creation of new narratives, mythmaking remains a crucial part of how we understand the world. We have only to turn to contemporary literature and poetry to discover that the gods are still in our midst.

Crime fiction is now the world’s most popular genre of literature and detectives, its most famous protagonists. But did you know that detectives were already blazing trails across the globe in the 19th century, way before Scandi noir or even Agatha Christie? In my talk, I’ll be exploring how these harbingers of modernity reshaped the faces of publishing, policing and policy with radical new notions of crime and justice.