Akshya Saxena

Assistant Professor of English

I work on 20th and 21st century Anglophone world literature, film, and media, with a focus on South Asia.  My areas of interest include:  critical translation studies, postcolonial studies, media studies, critical theory, and politics of caste in South Asia.  I am currently working on a book project tentatively titled "Vernacular Englishes:  Language and Democratic Politics in Post-liberalization India."  This work investigates the violent but abiding allure of the English language in postcolonial India.  It examines 20th and 21st century Indian Anglophone literature along with a previously unexplored corpus of texts such as Hindi literature, diasporic and Bollywood films, hybrid Hindi-English language in Hindi newspapers, and India's post-Independence language policy.  Research for this project has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Social Science Research Council.