Aarthi Vadde
Associate Professor of English

Aarthi Vadde works in the field of 20th-21st century Anglophone literature with particular interests in the historical and technological forces conditioning migration and globalization.  She looks at how literary history interfaces with theories of internationalism, the history of computation, and media studies more generally. 

Her book Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism beyond Europe, 1914-2016 was published by Columbia UP in 2016 and won the ACLA's 2018 Harry Levin Prize for outstanding first book in the field of comparative literature.  A special forum on the book was convened by The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry.   Chimeras illustrates how modernist and contemporary writers from Rabindranath Tagore to Zadie Smith reimagine the nation and internationalism in a period defined by globalization. Drawing on close readings of individual texts and on literary, postcolonial, and cosmopolitical theory, Vadde explains how modernist challenges to traditional notions of aesthetic form enable newfound understandings of the cohesion and interrelation of political communities.  An interview related to the book is available here .

Vadde is at work on a second book entitled “We the Platform: Contemporary Literature after Web 2.0.”  In it, she considers how technical and rhetorical shifts in the formulation of the World Wide Web (from network to platform) are shaping contemporary literary culture and popular literacy practices.  The book’s archive features print-based writers of fiction alongside social media upstarts, guerilla writer-publishers, fans, data artists, and engineers. Communications platforms are never neutral, and this book will show how literary works and humanistic criticism can play key roles in the dialogue on responsible computing.

In addition to her monograph projects, Vadde is co-editor of a volume on the history of literary criticism entitled The Critic as Amateur (Bloomsbury Academic 2019).  Read the intro here . She is also co-editing the 20-21st century volume of Palgrave's Handbook on Literature and Science.

Vadde joined Duke in 2011 after completing a postdoctoral fellowship in the English Department at Harvard University.


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