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Department of English

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 is a study of African diasporic culture and politics in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic World.

 

In addition to my book project, I currently am working on article-length projects that investigate the following topics: (1) the use of enslaved children as fences on plantations across the antebellum U.S. South; (2) militant resistance to slavery in eighteenth-century Antigua; and (3) the history of the concept of "the Black commune." In concert with my research, I teach courses on African American literature, hemispheric American literature before 1900, and prison writing.

 

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 Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania in 2021. My first name is pronounced like this: UH-jay.

Representative publications

Representative Publications:

  •  "Becoming Fellow-Servants: Slavery, Theft, and Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century South." Forthcoming in American Literature, vol. 96, no. 4, 2024. 
  •  "Reading with Conviction: Abraham Johnstone and the Poetics of the Dead End." Early American Literature, vol. 55., no. 2, 2020, pp. 331–54. 

Awards

  • Postdoctoral Fellowship, Society of Fellows in the Humanities, University of Southern California, 2021–23
  • Diane Hunter Dissertation Prize, Department of English, University of Pennsylvania, 2022
  • Dean’s Scholar Award, School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania, 2021
  • The 1921 Essay Prize in American Literature, American Literature Society, 2020
  • Marguerite Bartlett Hamer Fellowship, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, 2019–20
  • William Patrick Day Essay Prize, Department of English, University of Pennsylvania, 2018
  • Francis Hopkinson Fellowship, School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania, 2017–18
  • Sweeten Prize for Best Graduate Essay in American Literature, Department of English, University of Pennsylvania, 2017
  • Benjamin Franklin Fellowship, School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania, 2015–21