Education

• BA, Mount Carmel College, Bengaluru
• MA, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi
• MPhil, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi
• DPhil in English, University of Oxford

Profile

Bhagya completed my DPhil in English at the University of Oxford in 2021, where she wrote on representations of the Indian Emergency (1975-77) in Indian writings in English. 

She was Lecturer in English at the Division of English and Creative Writing at Brunel University of London from 2021-2024 and taught as a tutor in English at the University of Oxford from 2017-2023. She has also taught at IIT Delhi, Christ (DTB) University, and Mount Carmel College, Bengaluru. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, UK.

Bhagya specialises in postcolonial and world literatures, with a focus on representations of political crises, cities of the global south, cosmopolitanism and migration, speculative fiction, and literature and the Anthropocene. She has particular interests in political theory on states of exception and in the philosophy of temporality, especially how they both relate to modes of literary and visual representation. She also has a strong interest in comparative approaches to Indian literatures—particularly modernist and contemporary writing in English and Kannada.

Her academic work has been published in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Oxford Research in English, Wasafiri, Postcolonial Text, Contemporary Literature, and The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures, among others. Her pedagogy-focussed writing can be found in the English Review magazine, Writers Make Worlds, and Teaching Anglophone South Asian Diasporic Literature (MLA Options for Teaching series).

She is the co-convenor of The Postcolonial Anthropocene Research Network and has co-edited a collection of essays on “The Postcolonial Anthropocene: Contemporaries in Crisis,” forthcoming soon. Her first book, Literatures of the Indian Emergency (1975-77): Tropes of Exception is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. More information about her work can be found here.

Research Interests

• South Asian literature and visual culture; political crisis and representation; postcolonial studies; philosophy of temporality; environmental studies