Shital Pravinchandra, BA, MA, PhD (Cornell)

Profile

I have two main research interests: postcolonial studies’ intersections with the health humanities and the short story as a global literary form. My current book project is contracted with Bloomsbury Academic’s Explorations in Science and Literature series, and is entitled Longevity Fictions: Literature, Biomedical Science, and Postcolonial Critique. Reading medical and scientific writing alongside literary texts, the book shows how developments in the biomedical sciences have created new iterations of colonialism, which are problematically presented as desirable because their stated aim is to produce human health and longevity. I argue that such developments ultimately generate new ways of laying claim to and disciplining the bodies of Black, Brown and Indigenous people.

My future research projects will explore the popularity of the short story in South Asian regional-language literatures, and the contrasting dominance of the novel in Anglophone South Asian writing.

I have previously taught at SOAS and at Yale, and here at QM I teach core modules in Comparative Literature and also offer courses based on my research, such as “Literatures of the Postcolonial World” and “Medicine and Ethics in Contemporary Global Literature.”

I convene the department’s iBSc in Global Medical Humanities, and co-chair the Health and Humanities Research Forum, which I co-founded.

I co-edit the Routledge book series Global Literatures: Twenty-First Century Perspectives and the journal Literature, Critique and Empire Today (formerly the Journal of Commonwealth Literature).

Research

Research Interests:

Postcolonial studies, Literatures of South Asia, World literature, Medical humanities, Contemporary Anglophone literature.

Publications

Books

Longevity Fictions: Literature, Biomedical Science, and Postcolonial Critique (under contract with Bloomsbury Academic)

Journal articles

'‘More than biological’: Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves as Indigenous countergenetic fiction', Medical Humanities 47 (2), 2021:135-144.

Claire Chambers and Shital Pravinchandra. Guest Editorial: Postcolonial past, world present, global futures? Journal of Commonwealth Literature (53:3, 2018)

"One Species, Same Difference? Postcolonial Critique and the Concept of Life." New Literary History, Special issue on Climate, Species, Anthropocene (47:1, 2016)

"Not Just Prose: Amitav Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosome, the South Asian Short Story and the Limits of Postcolonial Studies." Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies (May 2013: online publication) (print: 16:3, 2014)

"Hospitality for Sale or Dirty Pretty Things." Cultural Critique (Fall, 2013)

Book chapters

“Short Story and Peripheral Production.” In The Cambridge Companion to World Literature, Cambridge University Press, 2018.

“Body Markets: The Technologies of Global Capitalism and Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest.” In Science Fiction, Imperialism, and the Third World: Essays on Literature and Film, McFarland Press, 2010.

“The Third World Body Commodified.” In Commerce of the Body: Issues, Challenges and Ethics, Hyderabad, Icfai University Press, 2008.