Dissertation Title:

I am a sixth-year doctoral candidate in the Graduate Program in Literature at Duke University. My areas of specialization include literary theory and criticism, 20th and 21st century global Anglophone literature, history and theory of the novel, media theory, and feminist and postcolonial studies. My dissertation shows how the novels of J.M. Coetzee, Wilson Harris, Zadie Smith, and Ahmed Saadawi represent history in a visual rather than a narrative form. I designate this emergent aesthetic form in global literature as allegory, following the diagrammatic sense provided by Walter Benjamin in The Origin of German Tragic Drama. I bring my prior training in mathematics and computer science to bear on my current research through my engagement with questions of structure, style, and syntax in cultural and literary studies.

Recent Publications

1. Bhattarai, P. "Algorithmic Value: Cultural Encoding, Textuality, and the Myth of Source Code.." Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 3.1 (2017): 1-1.