Shuchi Kapila teaches British and Postcolonial Studies at Grinnell College.
She has taught at Miranda House (Delhi University, Delhi, India), Cornell
University, and Kenyon College before coming to Grinnell. She received her
B.A (Hons.), M.A. and M.Phil degrees from Delhi University, and a Ph.D.
in English from Cornell University. Her courses at Grinnell include an upper-level
seminar entitled "Imagined Communities: Tribes in Literature,"
"The Empire Writes Back: Introduction to Postcolonial Studies,"
"Feminism and Difference," and "Travel Narratives."
Her research interests include colonial and postcolonial studies, Victorian
fiction, South Asian fiction, and literary theory. She has published articles
in major journals such as Interventions, Victorian Studies,
and Nineteenth-Century Contexts. She is currently working
on a book length manuscript on family romances of British India.
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Ph.D. in English, Cornell
University, Ithaca, New York, August 1996
M.Phil. in English, University of Delhi, Delhi, India, January 1990
M.A. in English, University of Delhi, Delhi, India, August 1987
B.A. in English, University of Delhi, Delhi, India, August 1985 (Honours)
For more details, please refer to my Curriculum Vitae: HTML
Page | Word Document
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“The Domestic Novel Goes Native: Bithia Mary Croker’s Anglo-India,”
forthcoming in Nineteenth-Century Contexts.
Book Review [on recent Partition literature]. Interventions 1.2 (1999):
312-316.
“Educating Seeta: The Erotics and Politics of Pedagogy in the Colonial
Romance.” Victorian Studies (Winter 1998) 41.2: 211-24
“The Other.” Dictionary entry in Feminist Literary Theory:
A Dictionary. Garland Publishing, New York, 1997. 296-297.
“The Poverty of Theory,” and “An Interview with Aijaz
Ahmad,” The Bookpress , April 1993. 7-13
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"Bibis and Begums: Company Affairs in Colonial India." MLA Conference, San Diego, Dec 28, 2003.
“'I am a budmash.
All governments put me in jail': the secular outlaw in the fiction of Khushwant
Singh and Saadat Hasan Manto.” “Siting Secularism,” Oberlin
College, April 19-21, 2002.
“Disrupting Genealogies: Sealy's Trotter-nama
and the critique of Focault,” INCS, George Mason University, April 11-14, 2002.
“The Gender of Good Rule: Queen Victoria and the Royal Widows,”
The Victorian World:
“Britain, the Empire, and the United States in the 19 th Century,”
University of California, Los Angeles, October 25-27, 2001
“Indira, India, and the limits of biography,” Conference on
South Asia, University of Wisconsin-Madison, October 18-21, 2001.
“Pedagogy and Postcolonial Studies,” Postcolonial Studies Symposium,
Kenyon College, April 1, 2001
Panel Discussant, “Speaking in Public: Narratives of Shame and Honor
among Women in South Asia,” South Asian Women's Conference, Los Angeles,
May 6-7, 2000.
“Suicide in Partition Literature: The Fiction of Khushwant Singh and
Saadat Hasan Manto,” Narrative, Atlanta, April 6-9, 2000.
“Desperately Seeking Sufiya: The Question of Genre in Rushdie's Shame,” 9th Postcolonial and Commonwealth
Studies Conference,” Feb 24-26, 2000.
“Educating Seeta: The Colonial Romance in Nineteenth-Century British
India,” Invited talk, South Asia Program, Cornell University, September
23, 1996.
“Theory and the Construction of a Project,” Annual Literature
Club Conference, Cornell University, April 11-12, 1996.
“Policing the Boundaries of the Home: the Colonial State as Paterfamilias
,” Annual South Asian Studies Conference, University of Wisconsin-Madison,
October 20-22, 1995.
“The Good Orientalist and the Native Woman: Reading the Historical
Unconscious of Philip Meadows Taylor's Seeta,” Psychoanalysis and
Postcolonialism: Nation, Identity, Self, George Washington University, October
12-14, 1995.
“Culture as Critique: Is There an Academy in This text?,” National
Asian-American Arts Conference, New York, December 18, 1993.
“Theorizing the 'Self' in History and Psycholanalysis,” History
and Theory: Disciplines and their Consequences, Cornell University, May
1, 1993.
Introduction to Indian Writing in English
215 Mears
Grinnell College
Grinnell, IA 50112
Ph.: 641-269-3655
Fax: 641-269-4733
e-mail:kapilas@grinnell.edu