Curriculum Vitae

Tania Roy

CURRENT POSITION

2015-present, Senior Lecturer, Chair of the Graduate Studies Programme, English Literature
.

PREVIOUS ACADEMIC EXPERIENCE

2010-15 Assistant Professor, Dept. of English Literature and Language (ELL), National University of
Singapore
2006-09 Visiting Fellow, National University of Singapore (ELL)
2004-06 Post-doctoral Fellow, National University of Singapore
(ELL)
2000-01 Visiting Lecturer, Humboldt University, Berlin (Political and Cultural Theory)

DISSERTATION, Duke University, 2003. Domainless Sovereignty: Art and the Place of Memory in
T.W. Adorno’s Reflections on Social Power

Chair: Romand Coles (Political Theory):

Examiners: Kenneth Surin (Literature);
Michael Gillespie & Kimberly Curtis
(Political Theory).
Readers: Romand Coles, Michael Gillespie
&Richard Bernstein (New School for Social Research)

EDUCATION
2003 Ph.D: (Political Theory) Duke University, Durham, NC

2000-2001 Graduate Exchange Fellow, The Free University, Berlin (The Hermeneutic
Institute)

1994 BA: Bryn Mawr College, PA. (Political Theory) Magna cum Laude
Graduation with Highest Distinction in Political Science and Award for
Excellence in English Literature.

TEACHING AREAS at NUS

Critical Theory and aesthetics, especially Adorno and the Frankfurt School; Postcolonial Theory and
Literature (undergraduate and Honours); World Literature; Literature and Psychoanalysis

Trauma Studies and literature (postgraduate).

RESEARCH AREAS at NUS

Areas: Critical Theory, especially Frankfurt School aesthetics; Postcolonial studies and World
literature.
SCHOLARLY PUBLICATIONS
Books
Monograph: The Architects of Late Style in India: Rabindranath Tagore, Mulk Raj Anand, Vikram
Seth and Dayanita Singh. (Farnham, UK: Ashgate/Routledge). For series ‘Twentieth Century
Literatures and Modernism’, forthcoming, 2018/19).

IRJ’s
Published
Performative Realism: Late Style, between T.W. Adorno and M. R. Anand in European
Legacy: Toward New Paradigms (Special Issue on Adorno and Performance), Vol. 16, July 2016.

Non-Renewable Resources: The Aesthetics and Politics of Vivan Sundaram’s Trash.

Theory, Culture & Society December 2013 vol. 30 no. 7-8 265-276.

Co-editor of special section on the City-as-Target, Mumbai. Theory Culture & Society, 26, no. 7-
8 (2009)
-- Introduction -- City-as-Target: Mumbai, pp. 263-277;
-- Mumbai, “India’s 9/11”: Accidents of a Moveable Metaphor. Theory Culture & Society,
26, no. 7-8 (2009) 314-328.

Wreck, Restoration and the Work of Carrying On: History on Vivan Sundaram’s Boat-
Works.” Cultural Politics, 5, no. 3 (2009). pp 359-384

After Eco-Feminism: The Splintered Subject of Agrarian Nationalism in India.

Alternatives, Vol. 28, no. 1 (2003). pp. 57-89, with Borowiak C.

Book Chapters
Published
‘Tagore in the Conjunction of World Literature’ (Wiley-Blackwell Companion to World
Literature), forthcoming 2018.

Communities Ap/art: Insiders, Outsiders and the Dissensus of Community -- lead essay
for OUTside India: Dialogues and Documents of Art and Social Change, D’Souza. E (London and
New Delhi: Wieiden and Kennedy). 2012. 10 pages.

The Body in the “Mise en Abyme of History”: Ranbir Kaleka and the Art of Auschwitz after
Virilio, in Virlio and the Visual, ed. John Armitage and Ryan Bishop, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press). 2012.
Vivan Sundaram’s “Amrita”: Toward a Style of the Body, in Narrating Race: Asia,
(Trans)nationalism, Social Change. Ed. R. Goh. (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi). 2011.
Pp.25-48.

Historical Plots and Cultural Form -- Adorno on the Essay in the Aftermath, in Culture and
Power: The plots of history in performance, ed. Ruben Valdes Miyares and Carla Rodriguez
Gonzales. (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press). 2008. pp. 271-279

In process
Revisiting ‘End of Empire’: Futurities from Kochi-Muziris for Cultural Politics.

Extended Review-essay (peer reviewed):

Postcolonial Disconsolation, and After: A Review of A History of the Indian Novel in English,
ed. Ulka Anjaria, in European Legacy, 23(6).

2015 "'Thought Images: Frankfurt School Writers' Reflections from Damaged Life,” by
Richter, G. The Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature, 8, no. 1 (Fall 2009/Spring 2010).
pp 1-11.

Invited Contributions
Travelling with Beauvoir: The Significance of 'Embodied Experience for Gendered Violence
and Super-Nationalism in India. The Journal for French and Francophonic Philosophy Special
Issue on ‘Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex’. (previously, The Bulletin for the American
Society on French Philosophy). Volume 4, no.1. pp. 160-166.

Teaching Lolita in (a) Consuming Culture (A Cultural Studies Perspective), with Whalen-
Bridge, J in Approaches to Teaching Nabokov’s Lolita. Eds. Zoran Kuzmanovich and
Diment, G. (New York: The Modern Language Association). 2008. pp.62-70.

RECENT CONFERENCE PARTICIPATION and COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH

PROJECTS

May, 2018 Bequeathing Form to Bare Life: Anuk Arudpragasam’s A Brief Marriage
(Society for Novel Studies (Cornell University)

Urbanity and Subalternity: Approaches to World Literature July 2018, in collaboration

with graduate-faculty participants of the Department of Modern and Comparative
Literatures, Warwick University (at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London)

2018 (September) ‘ Gender Hierarchy: A Critique of Verticality and Looking Toward a

New Diversified Geometry’
Respondent to Patricia Reed and Amy Ireland, Lasalle College of the Arts (the Graduate
Programme in Art History, and Grey Projects; in partnership with the Goethe Institute,
Singapore)

2017-18 Sem.2 – co-convenor, Graduate Faculty workshop on World Literature

after the Postcolonial

2018 Reading for Afterlives in Rana Dasguptas’s Solo: Spectral Realism, History and World
Fiction (at SOAS, with Warwick University).

2016 ‘In the Scale of the World: The Great Bengal Famine, from Bhibutibhushan
Bandhopadhyay to Satyajit Ray’, at the Biennial Conference of NOVEL: Society for Novel
Studies (University of Pittsburgh, PA) for Panel: The Non-Anglophonic World Novel

2015 ‘In the Image of the Estuarine – Testimony and Realism in Ranbir Kaleka’s The House
of Opaque Water’, for the Inter-Asian Cultural Studies Conference, Panel: Archipelgic
Thinking – Culture and Aesthetics Beyond the Continent

2012 Co-convener: ‘Adorno and the Crisis of the Contemporary’, Brown University,
Providence, RI (at the annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association).

2011-12 Invited Participant in collaborative project (with the University of British

Vancouver): Sustaining Culture/Cultures of Sustainability: Asian and Asia- Pacific Perspectives.

2010 Megacities: Problematizing the Urban (Vol. 2) through Theory Culture and Society
workshop/Institute for Critical Theory, University of California, Irvine.

2009 Invited Participant at the 50th Anniversary of World Literatures, University of

Wisconsin-Madison

2009-10 Co-convener of 4 semester-long Faculty Research Group, ‘Politics/Aesthetics: The

Calculus of Community’

2010 Co-convener of associated workshop, with Alphonso Lingis as key-note speaker, ‘The
Calculus of Community: Politics and Aesthetics’(National University of Singapore

2007 Presentation: ‘Pedagogy of Non-violence’. Co-authored with Dr. Ingrid Hoofd (New
Media and Communications, NUS) for Forty Years of Structure, Sign and Play: Critical Method
in the Human Sciences (International Conference on Derrida, convened by A/P John Philips,
ELL.

GRANTS:
2017-18 FASS/SSRC pedagogical grant for establishing a short-course (graduate-faculty) on World
Literature for semester 2, 2018, with international participation form invited scholars.

20016-19 second investigator with John Phillips, Aesthetics and Pedagogy (Tier 1 Academic Research
Fund; to support exchange initiatives with the European Graduate School).

2009-10 SSRC grant for reading group and workshop, with Alphonso Lingis as Keynote speaker,
Politics/Aesthetics.

AWARDS

2016-17 Faculty Teaching Award for Excellence – Special Award for Versatility
2015-2016 Department nominee for the Annual Excellence in Teaching Award
2014-15 Faculty Teaching Award for Excellence – winner (department nominee)
2013-2014 Faculty Teaching Award for Excellence – winner (department nominee)
2012-2013 Department nominee for the Annual Excellence in Teaching Award
2011-12 Faculty Teaching Award for Excellence – winner (department nominee),
2009-2010 Faculty Teaching Award for Excellence – nominee (department nominee)

2002-2003 Gerst Teaching Fellow in Economic, Political and Humanistic Thought, Duke University
2001-2002 Graduate Fellow, Kenan Program in Ethics, Duke University
2003 Finalist for the Midwest Political Science Association’s Prize on ‘Women and Politics’: The
Sophonisba Breckinridge Award, for After Eco-feminism: the Splintered Subject of Agrarian Nationalism in
Post-Independent India

1993-1994 Dorothy Nepper Marshall Fellow, Bryn Mawr College,

Thesis: Aurobindo Ghosh and his Mystical Modernism: the Ambivalent Origins of Indian Secularism.
1994 Award for Best Senior Essay in English Literature: The Lost Chord: Innocence and Irony in the
Aesthetics of Heinrich von Kleist, Bryn Mawr College.

RECENT PUBLIC OUTREACH

November 2017 Writer’s Festival, moderator for Tash Aw, Edouard Louis and Xu Xi on Life-Writing –
Truth and Emotion

October 2015, Introduction to Satyajit Ray’s cinema (at the Ray retrospective, National Film Society,
National Museum).