Ajay Kumar Batra

Assistant Professor of English

I am a literary and cultural historian working at the intersection of hemispheric American studies, slavery studies, and Black studies. My current book project, The Common Notion: Origins of Black Radicalism in the Age of Atlantic Slavery, offers a new interpretation of Black diasporic culture and politics in the United States and the British Caribbean during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Examining a diverse range of literary, print cultural, and archival sources, The Common Notion illuminates a hitherto neglected tradition of early Black political thought and practice that embraced the political form of the commune—rather than the self-possessing individual of liberalism—as the necessary basis for collective liberation in the wake of slavery. The interdisciplinary nature of this book project reflects my deep investment in combining the methodological tools of literary studies and history with perspectives from contemporary critical theory.

In addition to The Common Notion, I am in the preliminary stages of work on two additional book-length projects. The first project, Dark Arts: Commodifying Life in the Archives of Slavery, seeks to develop a new analytical approach to the material and cultural processes through which Black life became configured as property within the institution of chattel slavery. Focused on the antebellum U.S. South, Dark Arts looks beyond legal frameworks and acts of racialized violence to investigate the more subtle and insidious ways in which enslavers and their associates expressed the impulse to commodify their Black subordinates, often through quotidian interactions or through the production of texts, such as letters, notebooks, and advertisements. As part of my work on this project, I have been conducting research and writing on the following topics: (1) the rumored use of enslaved children as fences on Southern farms and plantations, and (2) the everyday business correspondence of Southern slave traders. The second project—which extends my interest in Black radicalism into the twentieth century—is a study of the political thought of George Jackson (1941–1971), an incarcerated African American intellectual associated with the Black Panther Party.

In concert with my research, I teach courses on African American literature, hemispheric American literature before 1900, prison writing, and critical theory. I welcome inquiries from prospective PhD applicants planning to specialize in American, Caribbean, or transatlantic literatures before 1900, or in Black studies and/or critical theory during any historical period.Prior to joining Vanderbilt, I was a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Southern California. I earned my PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania in 2021. My first name is pronounced like this: UH-jay.