Apala Das received her PhD from the University of Toronto in 2024. She specializes in 20th-century global anglophone literatures, modernist poetry and poetics, and postsecularism studies. Other areas of her research and teaching interests include postcolonial theory and ethics, world and comparative literatures, South Asian literatures, and political theology.
Dr. Das is currently working on a book project titled Modernist Asceticisms: Discipline, Form, and the Postsecular in the Transnational Twentieth Century that examines selected twentieth-century literary experiments as instances of modernist asceticism, which is conceptualized in this project as constituting critical and creative responses to the ideological and biopolitical forces latent in asceticism. This study explains how writers like Rabindranath Tagore, Hilda Doolittle, Aurobindo Ghose, and May Sinclair negotiated with the ascetical ideals and ideologies available to them in their own distinct literary and historical contexts. Dr. Das’s project draws upon a prominent body of scholarship on asceticism in global modernity, which forges continuities between capitalist modernity, the biopolitics of colonial governmentality, the imperatives underlying reactionary religious ethno-nationalisms, and the formation of the secular liberal citizen-subject.
For her doctoral work, Dr. Das received several awards and research grants, including two Ontario Graduate Scholarships, the Chancellor Jackman Junior Fellowship (from the Jackman Humanities Institute, University of Toronto), and the Khashu Award for Tagore Studies (from the Institute for South Asia Studies, UC Berkeley).
Refereed Journal Articles
“Abundance, Scarcity, and the Question of Translatability in Raymond Carver and Ai Jiang’s Meta-Minimalist Fiction” [co-authored with Robert McGill and Connor Bennett; currently under revise and resubmit with Modern Fiction Studies], 2024
“Reading in the Night of Wallace Stevens’ ‘The Rock,’” The Wallace Stevens Journal, Vol. 45, Issue 2, 2021, pp. 179-194.
“Modernity and Mobility: Re-reading Wordsworth and De Quincey,” The Explicator, Vol. 79, Issue 1-2, 2021, pp. 48-51.
“The Revaluation of Hybridity in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Vol. 56, No., 1, 2020, pp. 18-29.
Book Chapters
“An Introduction to Sri Aurobindo’s ‘The Ideal Spirit of Poetry’ and ‘Conclusion’ from The Future Poetry (India, 1917),” Aesthetics and Politics in the Global South, ed. J. Daniel Elam, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021, Bloomsbury Philosophy Library. Web. 22 May 2023.
Book Reviews
“The Unending moving-away: Reading Mobility as Culture in Gabriele Schwab’s Imaginary Ethnographies.” Review of Gabriele Schwab’s Imaginary Ethnographies: Literature, Culture, & Subjectivity. The Scattered Pelican. Vol. 3.1, 2018, 120-125.