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.