JAP-NANAK KAUR MAKKAR

Currently I am Assistant Professor of English at the University of Kentucky, and formerly an ACLS Postdoctoral Fellow (2020-2022) at the same institution.  I received a B.A. (Hons.) and an M.A. from the University of Toronto, and a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 2018. My research examines the relationships between postcolonial fiction, poststructuralism and the history of technology, three overlapping areas that I approach through an engagement with histories of colonialism and capitalism. I have additional research interests in the history of critique, race and ethnicity studies, and Marxist approaches to literature.

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My book project, tentatively titled Enigmas of Capital: Literature and Theory in the Late Twentieth Century, explores the entanglement of theory and postcolonial literature by interpreting the role of 'enigmas' in the novels of J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi. Some of my work appears or is forthcoming in New Literary History, Modern Fiction Studies, Contemporary Literature and boundary 2.