Research Interests for Aarthi Vadde

Aarthi Vadde works in the fields of British and Anglophone literature with particular interests in the history of migration and globalization, theories of internationalism, the environmental humanities, and media studies. Her current book project, entitled “Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism beyond Europe, 1914-2014” (forthcoming Columbia UP) reformulates the concept of modernist internationalism against the backdrop of a globalizing modernity. Tracing the convergence between literary formal experimentation and "chimerical" political theories of internationalism in works from across South Asia, Europe, the Caribbean, and North America, this study disturbs and diversifies the practices usually associated with modernism’s evolution and its legacies. More broadly, it shows how modernist literature mediates impasses in transnational cultural critique and contributes to the intellectual history of globalization. She is also at work on a second book project about amateurism as it brings literary history into conversation with digital culture, environmentalism, and the sociology of expertise within rapidly changing knowledge cultures. Vadde joined Duke after completing a postdoctoral fellowship in the English Department at Harvard. A list of her scholarly publications can be found below. An interview-based publication is available at the Kenan Institute for Ethics.

Keywords:

comparative method, Comparative Method, contemporary, the, in literature, Contemporary, The, In Literature, Digital Media Studies, environmentalism, Environmentalism, literary form, Literary Form, modernism (literature), Modernism (literature), postcolonial criticism, Postcolonial Criticism

Representative Publications

1. Vadde, A, Narratives of Migration, Immigration, and Interconnection, in The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction since 1945, edited by James, D (2015), pp. 61-75, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 9781107040236 [doi] [abs]
2. Vadde, A, Megalopolis Now (August, 2013) [megalopolis-now] [abs]
3. Vadde, A, Putting foreignness to the test: Rabindranath Tagore's Babu English, Comparative Literature, vol. 65 no. 1 (December, 2013), pp. 15-25, Duke University Press, ISSN 0010-4124 [doi] [abs]
4. Vadde, A, National myth, transnational memory: Ondaatje's archival method, Novel a Forum on Fiction, vol. 45 no. 2 (Summer, 2012), pp. 257-275, Duke University Press, ISSN 0029-5132 [Gateway.cgi], [doi] [abs]
5. Vadde, A, Reading deliriously, Novel a Forum on Fiction, vol. 45 no. 1 (Spring, 2012), pp. 23-26, Duke University Press, ISSN 0029-5132 [Gateway.cgi], [doi] [abs]
6. A. Vadde, “Guidance in Perplexity: Recasting Postcolonial Politics in J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello”, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature., vol. Vol. 41 no. 3-4 (2010), pp. 231-249. [abs] [author's comments]
7. Vadde, A, The backwaters sphere: Ecological collectivity, cosmopolitanism, and Arundhati Roy, Mfs: Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 55 no. 3 (January, 2009), pp. 522-544, ISSN 0026-7724 [doi]