Ania Loomba

Ania Loomba Photo

Catherine Bryson Professor of English

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Ania Loomba received her BA (Hons.), M. A., and M. Phil. degrees from the University of Delhi, India, and her Ph. D. from the University of Sussex, UK. She researches and teaches early modern literature, histories of race and colonialism, postcolonial studies, feminist theory, and contemporary Indian literature and culture. She currently holds the Catherine Bryson Chair in the English department. She is also faculty in Comparative Literature, South Asian Studies, and Women's Studies, and her courses are regularly cross-listed with these programs.

Her writings include Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (Manchester University Press; 1989; Oxford University Press, 1992) Colonialism/ Postcolonialism (Routledge, 1998; second edition, 2005; third edition 2015; Italian, Turkish, Japanese, Swedish and Indonesian editions) and Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (Oxford University Press, 2002). She has co-edited Post-colonial Shakespeares (Routledge, 1998); Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (Duke University Press, 2005), Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion (Palgrave, 2007) and South Asian Feminisms (co-edited with Ritty A. Lukose, Duke University Press, 2012) [http://southasianfeminisms.wordpress.com]. She is series editor (with David Johnson of the Open University, UK) of Postcolonial Literary Studies (Edinburgh University Press). She has also produced a critical edition of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra (Norton, 2011) [http://books.wwnorton.com/books/Antony-and-Cleopatra]

Her recent publications include Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies: Gender, Race and Sexuality (co-edited with Melissa Sanchez; Routledge, 2016) [https://www.routledge.com/Rethinking-Feminism-in-Early-Modern-Studies-Gender-Race-and-Sexuality/Loomba-Sanchez/p/book/9781472421753]; essays on early modern global contact; on race and embodiment; caste and its implications for understanding racial philosophies, and race in modern India. 

Her latest book, Revolutionary Desires: women, communism, and feminism in India (Routledge 2018), [https://www.routledge.com/Revolutionary-Desires-Women-Communism-and-Femi...examines the lives and subjectivities of militant-nationalistand communist women in India, from the late 1920s, shortly after the communist movement took root, to the 1960s, when it fractured. It traces their personal and political experiences through a wide range of writings—memoirs, autobiographies, novels, Party documents, and interviews—to show how they questioned, and were constrained by, the gendered norms of Indian political culture. 

Also forthcoming is an edited collection A Cultural History of Western Empires in the Renaissance (Bloomsbury, 2018).