Biography
Ananya Jahanara Kabir FBA is Professor of English Literature at King’s College London. Trained at the Universities of Calcutta, Oxford, and Cambridge, she taught at the University of Leeds before joining King’s in 2013. Her doctoral work was on the European Middle Ages. She uses that training to explore diverse areas where cross-cultural encounters, memory work, and multilingualism converge: the Kashmir conflict, the Partition of India, the Black Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean world.
Professor Kabir theorises the relationship between creolisation, archipelagicity, and ’alegropolitics’— a term she coined during her ERC Advanced Grant-funded project ‘Modern Moves’ (2013-2018), that explored the global popularity of African-heritage partner dances such as salsa, kizomba, bachata, and tango. From dance her interests now encompass textile, foodways, and built heritage as indices of creolisation. A passionate advocate of embodied and innovative methodologies for Arts and Humanities Research, she is a keen linguist: apart from English, Bengali and Hindi (languages she grew up with), she works with French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and various Creoles. She is learning Bahasa Indonesia and Japanese.
Professor Kabir is Fellow of the British Academy, and recipient of India’s Infosys Prize in the Humanities and Germany’s Humboldt Research Prize.
Her research has been funded by the AHRC, ESRC, ERC, EC, the British Academy, The Freie-Universtät Berlin, MG University, Kerala, KITLV Leiden, Wereldmuseum Amsterdam, The Bellagio Foundation, and Fondazione Centro di Incontri Umani.
Research interests and PhD supervision
Professor Kabir’s current research involves:
- Creolisation across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds
- Indian Ocean Studies; Afro-Asian solidarities; decolonial thought
- Archipelagic theory, memory studies, heritage studies
- Critical philology, medievalism, and empire
- Relationships between textuality and embodied cultural expression, especially dance and foodways
She has supervised successfully numerous PhDs who are now placed in institutions worldwide. She welcomes unconventional research plans that want to cross languages, genres, and periods, and theoretical orthodoxies. She is happy to help shape PhD projects that work with English alongside other languages, and has supervised theses using French, Spanish, Portuguese, (various) Creoles, Bengali, Assamese, and Siraiki sources. Projects must be interested above all in unpacking the pleasures, protocols, and politics of literary texts, alongside investigations into material and embodied culture.For more details, please see her full research profile.
For more details, please see her full research profile.
Teaching
Professor Kabir teaches modules at undergraduate and postgraduate levels that cross-cut historical periods and geographic spaces, and make students think harder about how literary production intersects with the big picture through the history and politics of colonialism, postcolonialism, slavery, and neoliberalism. Her modules are always research-led, which means that she updates her teaching to reflect shifts in her research agenda. In the past, therefore, she has offered modules on the Partition of India, writing from Pakistan, and the Kashmir conflict; more recently, her modules involve pirates, merchants, and sugar plantations. At both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, her teaching brings together literary and cultural histories of the Indian and Atlantic Oceans as spaces connected through modernity and (de)coloniality.
Expertise and public engagement
Professor Kabir engages with curatorial programming at high-profile cultural institutions across Europe, South, and Southeast Asia, including The Goethe-Institut’s ‘Echoes of the South Atlantic’ exhibition, and a new exhibition on textile and pattern at The Wereldmuseum, Amsterdam. Recent speaking engagements at public institutions include participation at the event ‘Serumpun 2025’ held at the Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore, the Serendipity Festival 2024, Goa, and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2023, Kochi.
Her research on African-heritage dance led to several seminars and workshops at dance festivals worldwide and she collaborates with festival organisers to shape the research element of their productions.
She also enjoys longstanding collaborations with dancers, musicians and visual artists of Black, Creole, and Asian heritages, including musician and activist Dino D’Santiago, visual artist Naiza Khan, and dancer and choreographer Shailesh Bahoran.
She has appeared on radio and TV nationally and internationally to speak on a range of subjects within her expertise, from the Kashmir conflict to the pleasures of texts about maroons and pirates; her outreach work on creolisation is regularly featured in Indian media. In recent years she has been working with cultural producers across South Asia to develop awareness of India’s histories of creolisation.
One of her most memorable aspects of public engagement has been acting as cultural consultant for Mattel, Inc., one of the world’s largest producers of children’s toys, on the series of their television programme Thomas and Friends set in India.
Selected publications
- “Creolizing Archipelagic Intimacies: Remembering India and Vietnam via Pondicherry,” Verge: Journal of Global Asias 11.1 (2005): 132-66
- “Archipelagic Memory and Indian Ocean Literary Studies: An Introduction”, co-edited with Luca Raimondi, special issue of Monsoon: Journal of the Indian Ocean Rim 2.1 (2024)
- “Crypt, Cornucopia and the Surface of Pattern: Vlisco’s Designs," Third Text 37.2 (2023): 193-206
- “The Creolising Turn and its Archipelagic Directions,” Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 10.1 (2023): 90-103
- “Rapsodia Ibero-Indiana: Transoceanic Creolization and the Mando of Goa,” Modern Asian Studies 55.5 (2020): 1581-1636