Greeshma Mohan

Areas of Interest & Expertise

  • Indian English novel
  • Dalit studies and critical caste studies
  • Literatures in translation
  • Life writing and autobiography
  • Affect and aesthetics
  • Theories of satire and humour

Biography

Greeshma is a part of the Undergraduate Programme.

She has a PhD from the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. In her thesis she analysed the relationship between affect and satire in the Indian English novel. She earned an MA and MPhil from the Centre for English Studies, JNU, New Delhi. Her MPhil work, enabled by the Junior Research Fellowship (JRF) endowed by the University Grants Commission (UGC), was on the emergence of autobiographical modes of storytelling by dalit writers in Kannada. 

Prior to joining Azim Premji University, she worked as Faculty Associate at the Centre for Writing and Pedagogy, Krea University, Sricity (2019−2021) where she taught courses on academic writing and literature. More recently, she worked as Lecturer at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Ecole Centrale School of Engineering, Mahindra University, Hyderabad (2021−2024) where she taught English and elective courses on science fiction and visual culture studies. 

She has presented her research at multiple conferences organised by the IACLALS, ECSAS, SASNET, MLA, ACLA, BASAS among others.

She has worked as an editorial intern at Zubaan Books, Delhi (2016) and Caravan: A Journal of Politics and Culture, Delhi (2017). She has also worked as Teaching Assistant in the School of Languages, JNU where she taught courses on Canadian literature, African literature in English among others and at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.

She is particularly interested in the literary forms of the novel and autobiography, in the relationships between aesthetics and politics, and affect, caste and the neoliberal order.

Courses

Publications

Book chapters

  • Mohan, Greeshma. (2025). Holy Cow, Unholy Meat: Food Ecologies, Affective Communities and Violence in The Revenge of the Non-Vegetarian. In Beings and Beasts: Human-animal relations at the Margins. (pp 97 – 110). Cambridge University Press. https://​doi​.org/​1​0​.​1​0​1​7​/​9​7​8​1​0​0​9​5​29945.
  • Mohan, Greeshma. (2025).  Remembering and Responsibility: A Study of Dalit Life Narratives. In Remembrance, Forgetting and Utterance: Rethinking the Politics of Memory in South Asia. (pp 32 – 42). Routledge. 

Book reviews

  • Mohan, Greeshma. (2021). [Review of the book A Burning by Megha Majumdar]. World Literature Today. https://​www​.worldlit​er​a​ture​to​day​.org/​2​0​2​1​/​w​i​n​t​e​r​/​b​u​r​n​i​n​g​-​m​e​g​h​a​-​m​a​j​umdar.
  • Mohan, Greeshma. (2018). [Review of the book Hired: Six Months in Low-Wage Britain by James Bloodworth]. Scroll. https://​scroll​.in/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​/​8​7​5​6​5​2​/​w​h​y​-​t​h​e​-​n​e​w​-​g​i​g​-​e​c​o​n​o​m​y​-​t​u​r​n​s​-​w​o​r​k​e​r​s​-​i​n​t​o​-​e​x​p​e​n​d​a​b​l​e​-​i​t​e​m​s​-​r​a​t​h​e​r​-​t​h​a​n​-​f​l​e​x​i​b​l​e​-​c​o​n​t​r​i​b​utors.
  • Mohan, Greeshma. (2017). [Review of the book The English Paradigm in India: Essays in Language, Literature and Culture]. JSL 21.

Working papers

  • Mohan, Greeshma. The regional magazine and the rationalist public sphere in the 21st century: A case study of Hosathu to be submitted to Naomi Walker, Matt Davies and Andrew Hobbs for The Edinburgh Companion to the Regional Magazine. Edinburgh University Press.

Conference papers

  • Mohan, Greeshma. (2025, September 10 – 12). Caste and the Kannada Novel. [paper presentation]. How to Write as a Modern: Changing Ways of Seeing and Showing in South Asian Literature II. Annual Meeting of the British Association of South Asian Studies, Lancaster University, Lancaster, United Kingdom.
  • Mohan, Greeshma. (2025, February 22). The Other Smells and Other Smells: Disgust as Sticky Affect in select Postcolonial Fiction. Attaching Affects: A Virtual Workshop on Affect Theory organized by the Society for the Study of Affect. Online.
  • Mohan, Greeshma (2025, February 28-March 1). Labouring Lives: Reading Precarity and Bodily Endurance in contemporary narratives on work. Vulnerable Bodies in Literature and Culture. IIT Hyderabad, Hyderabad, Telangana, India.
  • Mohan, Greeshma. (2024, March 14 – 17). Race as Caste, Caste as Race: Linkages and Limits. [paper presentation]. Caste-ing Academia: The Global Rise of (Critical) Caste Studies. Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
  • Mohan, Greeshma. (2023, December 14 – 17). Amateurism as Method: Reading in the Undergraduate Classroom [paper presentation]. Workshop at the Forum on Contemporary Theory, Baroda, Gujarat, India.
  • Mohan, Greeshma. (2023, March 1 – 3). Locating Caste in Indian Language Little Magazines: A Case Study of Hosathu [paper presentation]. Vernacular Periodicals and Dalit Writing: Production, Circulation and Reception. Gitam University, Hyderabad, Telangana. India.
  • Mohan, Greeshma. (2022, January 6 – 9). The Work of Aversive Emotions: On the Disturbing Novels of Upamanyu Chatterjee. [paper presentation]. Annual Meeting of the Modern Language Association. Washington DC, USA.
  • Mohan, Greeshma. (2021, August 17 – 18). Caste, Food Politics and Disgust in Upamanyu Chatterjee’s The Revenge of the Non-Vegetarian. [paper presentation]. Workshop titled Human-Animal Relations at the ​‘Margins’: A Quest for Social Justice. Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar, Gujarat. India, Online.
  • Mohan, Greeshma. (2021, July 26 – 29). A Brief Excurses into Food and Travel: Writing Leisure in the Postcolony. [paper presentation]. Annual Meeting of the European Conference of South Asian Studies. Vienna. Austria. Hybrid.
  • Mohan, Greeshma. (2021, February 12 – 13). Worksheets: The Role of Asynchronous Learning Tools in An Online Writing Classroom. [paper presentation]. Workshop titled Online and Downloadable: Academic and Creative Writing Pedagogies in the Pandemic. Krea University, Sricity, Andhra Pradesh, India. Online.
  • Mohan, Greeshma. (2020, December 9). Remembering and Responsibility: A Study of Dalit Life Narratives. [paper presentation]. Annual Meeting of the Swedish South Asian Network. Lund University, Sweden. Online.
  • Mohan, Greeshma. (2019, November). Speaking the Self in the Classroom. [paper presentation]. Workshop titled Classroom Affairs: A Symposium on Writing Pedagogies. OP Jindal Global University, Sonipat. India
  • Mohan, Greeshma. (2019, March 7 – 10). The only way out is through a secret joke: Comic Subversion and Postcolonial Satire. [paper presentation]. Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association, Georgetown University, Washington DC, USA.
  • Mohan, Greeshma. (2019, February 6 – 8). Migrant fictions in the Age of Post-Truth. [paper presentation]. Annual Meeting of the Indian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies. Pondicherry University, Pondicherry. India.
  • Mohan, Greeshma. (2018, July 31-Aug 3). Otherness and Time in Contemporary Indian Cinema. [paper presentation]. Global Timescapes: Entangled Temporalities in the global South. University of Tubingen, Germany.
  • Mohan, Greeshma. (2016, November). Novel as Storytelling: On Raja Rao’s Kanthapura. [paper presentation]. The Raja Rao Roundtable. Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India.
  • Mohan, Greeshma. (2015, October 6 – 9). Self- Help in the Global South: The Literary Culture of Getting Rich Quickly. [paper presentation]. Conference titled Other Spaces: Towards the Global South. University of Tubingen, Germany.
  • Mohan, Greeshma and Yadav, Kanak (2015, March). Between Men: Caste and the Domestic Sphere in Perumal Murugan’s One Part Woman. [paper presentation]. Conference titled Interrogating Masculinites. St Stephens College, New Delhi, India.
  • Mohan, Greeshma. (2014, February). Beyond the Ethnographic Imperative: Reading Aravind Malagatti’s Autobiography Government Brahmana. Annual Meeting of the Indian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies. Panjab University, Chandigarh, India.