Apala Das received her PhD from the University of Toronto in 2024. She specializes in 20th-century Global and Euro-American Modernisms, South Asian Literatures, Poetry and Poetics, Postcolonial Theory and Ethics, World and Comparative Literatures, Political Theology, and Postsecularism Studies. Dr. Das is currently working on her book project titled Modernist Asceticisms: Discipline, Form, and the Postsecular in the Transnational Twentieth Century, in which she studies selected twentieth-century literary experiments as instances of modernist asceticism, a phenomenon she defines as a critical and creative response to the biopolitical and ideological forces latent in asceticism. Tracing continuities between religious traditions and political concepts, Dr. Das’s project joins an emerging body of postsecular scholarship on the relationship between political theology and literature in global modernity. Her work explains how transnational twentieth-century writers and artists like Rabindranath Tagore, Hilda Doolittle, Aurobindo Ghose, May Sinclair, and Sister Nivedita engaged with the ascetical ideals and ideologies available to them in their own distinct literary and historical contexts and how their own literary-ascetical works constituted generative responses to their particular contexts of transnational modernity. Dr. Das’s project draws upon an existing and prominent body of critical reflections 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. It also takes its cue from the scholarly notion that modernism’s critical search for autonomy is constituted by what Peter Sloterdijk calls the “de-spiritualization of asceticisms.” Accordingly, Modernist Asceticisms fills an important gap in scholarship by extending the search for modernist asceticisms to the vibrant and multi-layered contexts of global modernity.
Dr. Das has been the recipient of 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). Dr. Das has taught courses in global modernisms, postcolonial and transnational literatures, and South Asian literatures.
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.