Professor Ruvani Ranasinha

Biography

I received my BA from the University of Bristol and my PhD from the University of Oxford.

I was co-investigator on the Leverhulme-funded International Network: Planned Violence: Postcolonial Urban Infrastructures and Literature (2014-16) and on the AHRC-funded project Making Britain: South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad, 1870-1950 (2007-10). 

I have held Visiting Fellowships at the University of Kelaniya (2016) and at the University of Vienna (2017). 

I am Consultant Editor of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies and on the editorial board of the feminist digital humanities Orlando project.

Research Interests and PhD Supervision

My research interests include:

• Postcolonial literature and theory especially relating to South Asia and  the South Asian diaspora
• post-1945 and contemporary fiction
• immigration and gender studies
• the history of the book.

My research interests are in postcolonial and contemporary literature and film, especially relating to South Asia and the South Asian diaspora with particular focus on gender, immigration, globalisation and the cultural representation of Muslim identity in the West.

I have written three monographs on postcolonial and contemporary literature: Hanif Kureishi: Writers and their Works (Northcote House 2002).

South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain: Culture in Translation(Oxford University Press 2007) is the first book to trace a literary genealogy of South Asian writing in twentieth-century Britain, and to historicise the emergence and development of Britain’s literary market for Asian writers.

Contemporary South Asian Women’s Fiction: Gender, Narration and Globalisation (Palgrave 2016) is the first book to analyse a new generation of award-winning anglophone South Asian women novelists and to destabilise the dominance of Indian fiction by focusing on female authors from Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh as well as India.

I am also the lead editor of South Asians and the Shaping of Britain, 1870-1950: a sourcebook (Manchester University Press, 2013).

For more details, please see my full research profile.

Teaching

I convene and teach a second-year undergraduate module on Contemporary Global Novels and a third-year undergraduate module on Postcolonial Perspectives. I currently teach my two MA modules Writing Global Cities andContemporary South Asian Women’s Writing.