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 subsequently used that training to explore diverse areas where cross-cultural encounters, memory work, and multilingualism converge. This trajectory has taken her research to 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 her perspective as an avid social dancer of these forms. 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 and the British Academy.

Research Interests and PhD Supervision

Professor Kabir’s current research involves:

• Creolisation across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds
• Indian Ocean Studies; African-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 languages other than English, and has supervised theses using French, Spanish, Portuguese, (various) Creoles, Bengali, Assamese, and Siraiki. 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.

Expertise and Public Engagement

Drawing on her research and outreach work, Professor Kabir regularly gives seminars and workshops at dance festivals worldwide (including Mindelo Kizomba Fesival, Mindelo, Cape Verde; Berlin Salsa Congress; Budapest Kizomba Connection; IKiz Festival, Tallinn; Batuke! London; and Salsa Addicted Festival, Timisoara) and collaborates with festival organisers to shape the research element of their productions. She engages with curatorial programming at several high profile cultural institutions across Europe and India, and 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, and 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.

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.

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