Nisha Viswanathan is Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology Tiruchirappalli. She holds a Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, with a specialization in postcritical literary studies. Her doctoral research addresses the absence of a sustained attention to Roberto Bolaño’s portrayal of author-reader transactions in Anglophone Bolaño scholarship, and consequently intervenes in ongoing debates on the changing dynamics of author-reader-text relations in critical theory. Her current research focuses on contemporary theoretical discourse at the intersection of authorship and critical practice, specifically addressing the crisis in criticism effected by the uncertainty regarding the author.
In addition, she has an enduring interest in the still-emergent field of critical posthumanities. Her earlier research examines the re-appropriation of the vampire myth in the age of technoscience while questioning the anthropocentrism of the extant humanist worldview. It brings into play methodologies borrowed from the disciplines of cultural studies, gender studies, animal studies and technoscientific studies to explore ideas of boundary dissolution and the destabilization of hierarchical dichotomies of the gendered, speciesist and humanist varieties.
Her interests cover the broad areas of Postcritical Literary Studies, Author Studies, Literary Theory and the Philosophy of Literature, Hispanic Literature in Translation, and Critical Posthumanism.
Email: nishav@nitt.edu
PhD, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (2019)
MPhil in English from the University of Hyderabad (2012)
MA in English from the University of Hyderabad (2010)
BA in English from All Saints’ College, affiliated to the University of Kerala (2008)
UGC Senior Research Fellowship (2015)
The 2012-13 Meenakshi Mukherjee Prize for Best MPhil Dissertation in English, University of Hyderabad (2014)
UGC Junior Research Fellowship (2012)
2nd rank, Master of Arts in English, University of Hyderabad (2010)
7th rank, Bachelor of Arts in English, University of Kerala (2008)
“Marketing Democracy to a Dictatorship: Pablo Larraín’s No and the Pragmatics of National Narratives.” Disnarration: The Unsaid Matters. Ed. Sudha Shastri. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan. 2016.
“Bored to Death: Violence and Narrative Indifference in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666.” Facing Our Darkness: Manifestations of Fear, Horror and Terror. Eds. Laura Colmenero-Chilberg and Ferenc Mújdricza. Oxford, UK: Inter-Disciplinary Press. 2015. (Republished by Brill Publishers in July 2019, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9781848884298_010)
Paper presented at the Postcritique Workshop led by Rita Felski and hosted by the Center for Uses of Literature, University of Southern Denmark, on 10th and 11th November 2023. Title: “Sens-ible Literary Dispositions and Socialities in Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction.”
Lecture delivered as part of the UGC-Sponsored Refresher Course in English Language & Literature organized by Bharatidasan University on 19th May 2022. Title: “Literary Studies and the Postcritical Turn.”
Invited talk organized by the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Jodhpur, on 11th November 2021. Title: "The Residuary Author and the Crisis of Criticism."
Lecture delivered as part of the UGC-Sponsored Refresher Course in English Language & Literature organized by Bharatidasan University on 15th September 2021. Title: "The Question of Authorship and Critical Practice Today."
International conference on Revolutions in Reading: Literary Practice in Transition held at Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden, 21-23 June, 2021. Title: "Un/critical Reading and Literary Community in Roberto Bolaño's Fiction."
Invited talk organized by the Department of English, DG Vaishnav College, University of Madras, on 6th November 2020. Title: "Introduction to Literary Criticism - From Structuralism to Poststructuralism."
The 15th MELUS-India / MELOW International Conference on the theme Towards Praxis: Literature, Society and Politics held at GGS Indraprastha University, Delhi, 19-21 February 2016. Title: "Literature on Trial: Rethinking the Notion of the Writer as Ethical Witness in Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile."
National Seminar on Multiple Modernisms organized by the Institute for Research in Interdisciplinary Studies (IRIS) and the Centre for Advanced Study (Philosophy), University of Rajasthan, Jaipur, 25-27 September 2015. Title: "The Vanguardist as Angel of History: The Temporal Poetics of Roberto Bolaño’s ‘Visceral Realism’."
The 8th Global Conference on Fear, Horror and Terror: Rituals, Myths and Symbolism, organized by Inter-Disciplinary.Net, Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom, 11-13 September 2014. Title: "Bored to Death: Violence and Narrative Indifference in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666."
National Seminar-cum-Workshop on Children’s /Young Adults’ Literature and Films, Department of English, University of Hyderabad, Feb. 28th - Mar. 2nd 2011. Title: "'These Violent Delights have Violent Ends’?: Viewing Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet as a Cathartic Montage of Violence."
Resurrecting Lost Literatures and Figures: Research Strategies, conducted at IIT Bombay on 7th April 2017 by Dr. Amit Ranjan, Zakir Hussain College, Delhi University, on Indo-Australian colonial connections and towards thinking about Indian Ocean Studies.
Media and Mediations: Workshop on Media Theory, conducted at IIT Bombay from 3rd – 4th April 2017 by Dr. Jenson Joseph, IIT Bombay, for research scholars working with forms and objects of media as primary/secondary material in their research projects.
Workshop on Process Philosophy based on a close reading of the chapter, “The New Aesthetic Paradigm” from Felix Guattari’s Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (1992), conducted at IIT Bombay on 17th February 2017 by Prof. Brian Massumi, Université de Montréal and Prof. Erin Manning, Concordia University. (Co-organizer)
Literature and the Archive, conducted at IIT Bombay on 7th October 2016 by Dr. Rochelle Pinto, Research Fellow, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi.
What Literally is (the) Literary?, conducted at IIT Bombay from 11th – 12th January 2016 by Prof. Udaya Kumar, Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
Series of workshops on Close Reading, Writing and Postcolonial Theory, conducted at IIT Bombay on 20th March, 26th March and 2nd April 2014 by Prof. Cara Ellen Murray, University of Houston-Downtown.
