I studied for my BA at the University of Leeds and, after teaching English in Egypt and South-East Asia, returned to Leeds to do an MA on the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz, and a PhD on political identity in South-Asian literature. I have taught at the University of Leeds and previously held lectureships at the University of York and the University of Portsmouth. I joined the Open University in 2011 as a Lecturer in English and Director of the OU’s Postcolonial Literatures Research Group. I am the deputy chair for English on AA100, The Arts Past and Present, and also act as deputy chair on the module team for AA316, The Nineteenth-Century Novel.
My areas of specialism encompass colonial literary cultures in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well as contemporary English literature from South Asia. I have carried out original literary-historical research on early South-Asian literature in English and have published a critical edition of the work of Shoshee Chunder Dutt, Selections from ‘Bengaliana’ (2005), which included a rediscovered short story by Kylas Chunder Dutt, ‘A Journal of Forty-Eight Hours of the Year 1945’ (1835), thought to be the first fiction in English by an Indian author. I am also interested in the history of literary transactions and dialogues between Indian and colonial authors, and have recently written on the politics of revolutionary terrorism and the imperial romance, as well as having published articles on Indian writings of the 1930s and ‘40s, short fictions of Partition, and literary cosmopolitanism. I am co-editor of an essay collection, Alternative Indias: Writing, Nation and Communalism (2005), and the author of a reader’s guide to Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (2007).
My most recent book, Terrorism, Insurgency and Indian-English Literature, 1830-1947 (2012), combines political philosophy, cultural materialism and literary history, and draws on Giorgio Agamben’s commentary on the sovereign exception in order to analyse narratives of insurgency and terror in India before 1947. As part of this project I revisited fictions by Philip Meadows Taylor, Rudyard Kipling and E. M. Forster, reading them in conjunction with literature and journalism by Hurrish Chunder Mookerji, S. K. Ghosh and Mulk Raj Anand. Contextualised around successive historical crisis moments such as the 1857 rebellion and the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, my work examined the contending meanings of political violence coded variously as atrocity, terrorism and contagion in the public discourses of colonial rule in India. The subject of colonial violence has also led me to work on Gandhian activism, and on narratives of political sacrifice in fictions dealing with Indian revolutionary nationalism and non-violent anti-colonial resistance. My current research project, Civil Fictions: Citizenship and Social Justice in Novels of the New India, deals with more recent postcolonial literature, and analyses the presentation of civil society in literary representations of the so-called ‘New India’.
In 2006 I was awarded an AHRC matched research leave grant and I was the recipient of a visiting scholarship at St John’s College, Oxford in 2010. I have been the editor of the Indian Literature section of the Year’s Work in English, chaired the publications committee of the Postcolonial Studies Association and acted as region judge (Europe and South Asia) for the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize in 2009. My collaborative research-involvements include acting as co-investigator on a Leverhulme Network project on ‘Planned Violence: Post/colonial Urban Infrastructures and Literature’, which will involve workshops and seminars in London, Johannesburg and New Delhi from January 2014.
As Director of the Postcolonial Research Group I run book launches, seminar series and conferences, details of which can be found on the group’s webpages. In 2012 I organised and convened a seminar series and one-day symposium at the Institute of English Studies, University of London on ‘South-Asian Fiction: Contemporary Transformations’, and co-organised a symposium on ‘The Book in Africa’. The group is currently running a seminar series on the history of anti-colonial thought, ‘Resources in Anti-colonial Thought’, and further networked events are being planned on literature and citizenship. I welcome PhD proposals on any of the topics above, or more generally on aspects of colonial and postcolonial literature.
Terrorism, Insurgency and Indian-English Literature, 1830-1947.
(London and New York: Routledge, forthcoming 2011)
Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. (London: Routledge, 2007)
Alternative Indias: Writing, Nation and Communalism.
Co-edited with Peter Morey (Amsterdam: Rodopi Cross/Cultures Series 82, 2005)
Selections from ‘Bengaliana’ by Shoshee Chunder Dutt.
Edited, with introduction and notes (Nottingham: Trent Editions, 2005)
Editor, special Issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing 64.5 (December 2010), titled ‘Beyond the Law: Postcolonial Legality and Legitimacy’.
‘Scholarship-Terrorists at the Highgate Hostel: Krishnavarma, Savarkar and Anti-Colonial Violence in Edwardian London’ in South Asians in Britain 1870-1950: Interactions and Modes of Resistance. Sumita Mukherjee and Rehana Ahmed, eds. (London: Continuum, forthcoming 2011)
‘Excavating the History of Terror: Thugs, Sovereignty and the Colonial Sublime’
in Terror and the Postcolonial. Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton, eds. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) pp. 177-201.
‘Cawnpore, Kipling and Charivari: 1857 and the Politics of Commemoration’.
Literature and History. 82.2 (Autumn 2009) pp. 1-19
‘Kipling’s Famine-Romance: Masculinity, Gender and Colonial Biopolitics in
“William the Conqueror”’. Journal of Postcolonial Writing. 45.3 (September 2009) pp. 251-263.
See also Open Research Online for further details of Alex Tickell’s research publications.
