Rajeswari Sunder Rajan

George Washington University, Ph.D., English, 1983 Bombay University, M.A., English, 1971 Bombay University, B.A., English, 1969

Rajeswari Sunder Rajan was educated in Bombay and Washington DC. She taught for many years in India before moving to the U.K. where she was Professorial Fellow at Wolfson College and Reader in the English faculty at the University of Oxford. Dr. Sunder Rajan has been a Senior Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library and at the Centre for Women's Development Studies, New Delhi; in 2001 she was a Shansi Visiting Professor at Oberlin College, Ohio. Dr. Sunder Rajan's work spans debates about the relationship between gender, postcolonialism and culture in India, and addresses issues relating to law, religion, and secularism in the postcolonial nation. Additionally, she works on British nineteenth-century literature and Anglophone postcolonial literature.

Sunder Rajan was one of the founding editors of the postcolonial studies journal Interventions, published by Routledge.

She has recently initiated, with Dr Neelam Srivatsava at Newcastle University (UK), a network research project on Postcolonial Print Cultures. The project brings together scholars from both institutions, along with other scholars from India, the UK and the USA, to collaborate in a series of workshops to map this new and rapidly growing field of research in postcolonial studies. Two international conferences, one at NYU and the other at Newcastle University, were organized in 2017 and 2018.

Among her recent publications are a volume of essays, Commodities and Culture in the Colonial World, jointly edited with Professors Supriya Chaudhuri, Josephine McDonagh, and Brian Murray (Routledge, 2017). The volume is the product of a three-year international collaboration on a project titled ‘Commodities and Culture, 1851-1914’, funded by a Leverhulme Network Grant. Other recent publications include an essay on ‘The Novel of India’, in Volume 10 of the Oxford History of the Novel in English, The Novel in South and South-East Asia since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming); 'Feminism's Futures: The Limits and Ambitions of Rokeya's Dream,' in Economic and Political Weekly (October 2015), and 'A Woman's Worth' in Granta (2015). 

Dr. Sunder Rajan is currently completing a book on the post-Midnight's Children Indian novel in English, while starting another (jointly with Anuradha Needham) on 'Women in Indian Cinema'.

Professor Sunder Rajan has offered a series of graduate courses under the rubric 'Concepts in Postcolonial Theory', which over the past twelve years has covered such topics as 'modernity', 'the other', 'subalternity', 'gender and feminism', 'the production of knowledge', 'diaspora, exile, and migration', 'postcolonial thought', 'World Literature', 'development,' 'the politics of religion and secularism' and 'the nation.'