Saikat Majumdar is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University. He has taught previously at Stanford University, and has been appointed a Fellow at the Newhouse Center for Humanities at Wellesley College, the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Advanced Study (JNU), the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study, and the Institute of Advanced Study at the Central European University. He is also a Research Fellow in English at the University of the Free State in South Africa.
He is the author of three books of criticism and nonfiction Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire (Honorable Mention, Modernist Studies Association Book Prize, 2014), a study of modern world literature in English, College (2018), a general nonfiction on liberal arts education in India, and the forthcoming The Amateur: Self-Making and the Humanities in the Postcolony (2024); and the co-editor, with Aarthi Vadde, of a collection of essays, The Critic as Amateur (2019).
Saikat has published four novels, most recently, The Middle Finger; The Scent of God, a finalist for the Mathrubhumi Book of the Year Award, 2020, and one of Times of India’s “20 Most Talked About Indian Books of 2019”; The Firebird (published as Play House in the US), one of Telegraph’s Best Books of 2015 and a finalist at the Bangalore Literature Festival Fiction Prize and the Mumbai Film Festival Word-to-Screen Market, and Silverfish, 2007. His new novel, The Remains of the Body, will be published in 2024.
Saikat’s research has been published in several academic journals and collections, including PMLA: Publication of the Modern Language Association of America, NLH: New Literary History, Cambridge History of the Indian Novel in English, Cambridge Companion to the Essay, Cambridge History of the British Essay, Wiley-Blackwell Companion to World Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, and Literary Activism: A Collection of Perspectives, edited by Amit Chaudhuri. His work also appears in Hindu, Telegraph, Los Angeles Review of Books, Times Higher Education, Times Literary Supplement, Hindustan Times, Indian Express, Scroll, Wire, Lit Hub, and other venues.
