Anushka Sen

Assistant Professor

My current research focuses on fleeting and elusive animal presence in twentieth-century literature as an entry point into the challenges of dwelling in global modernity. My book project, Settling and Straying: Modernism’s Territorial Rhythms, turns to animals as a key mediator of the tensions between a sense of rooting on the one hand (“settling”) and rootlessness on the other (straying) that give modernism its restless energies. How does a space come to be built, populated, and experienced as homely or not, and why do these questions often feel mysterious and ambivalent in modernism? I argue that the sneakily surprising presence of animals draws attention to the contradictions of (un)settlement, thus exposing a space’s territorial logic, so tied to the politics of property, nation, and race. Wrestling with these issues has also turned me towards issues of housing and houselessness, which I’ve started to explore in the work of poet Gwendolyn Brooks and which I plan to develop across a larger archive.

My choice to focus on animals who might be considered marginal or short-lived within a text comes from a pedagogical ethos of paying attention to things we might hurriedly move past. The importance of looking—or sensing—anew is crucial to my understanding of representation. I teach a wide swathe of poetry; film and popular media; topics in critical theory; and modern prose fiction across the realist-experimental spectrum. Through my classroom practices, I hope for students and myself to experience novel forms of recognition and fruitful estrangement. At the same time, I believe in the invigorating and clarifying process of making the leap from finer details towards identifying structures, systems and patterns of meaning and contradictions, and in attempting to synthesize them dialectically—however uneven the result. I attribute this conviction to the Marxist and Hegelian theory in which I take a growing interest and have started to teach.

Education

PhD, English Literature, Indiana University (2023)
MA, English Literature, Jadavpur University (2014)
BA, English Literature, Jadavpur University (2012)

Research Interests

Twentieth-century literature
Legacies of the modernism-realism debate
Studies in movement or mobility
Studies in space and infrastructure
Studies in the nonhuman
Legacies of Marxist and Hegelian thought; the Frankfurt school
Translation

Publications/Research Listings

Select Scholarly and Creative Publications

“Tagore’s Wardrobe,” co-authored with Judith Brown in Companion to Fashion and Literature, ed. Elizabeth Sheehan. Cambridge UP, 2026.
“Ways of Walking,” in Rust and Moth, Winter 2024.
“From Streetsmart to Stranded: Stray Encounters with the Modernist Cat,” in Modernism/modernity, September 2024.
“The Language of Community,” The Arkansas International, Issue 14, 2023.
“Clinical Poetics,” reflections on Chantal Maillard’s Killing Plato, trans. Yvette Siegert, October 2022.
“Between Land and Settler Subjectivity: The Modernist Animal’s Territory in Katherine Mansfield’s “Prelude.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, October 2022.
“Two Poems,” The Dalhousie Review, Themed Environmental Issue (100.3), 2020.

Awards

Parker Prize recipient from the English department at Indiana University, awarded to a standout dissertation in British literature, 2023
Fellowship recipient at Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference, 2022
Fellowship recipient at American Literary Translators Association conference, 2021