English Research Talks is an ongoing series that provides faculty an opportunity to share their current scholarship or creative work with the department community, creating conversations about topics of shared interest. The department will hold four of these events across the 2023-2024 academic year, with two faculty members offering brief overviews of recently published work or work in progress at each one. Lunch is served at the start of these sessions and time set aside for discussion at the end.
Pranav Jani, “Rewriting History, Constructing Identity: How Indians Imagined the 1857 Rebellion, 1857-1957”
Pranav Jani is Associate Professor of English and Program director of Asian American Studies. He is author of Decentering Rushdie (2010), and articles on South Asian literature, postcolonial theory, Marxism and historiography, revolutionary nationalism, and race & class. Pranav’s current book manuscript, Rebel Queens, Heroic Martyrs, and the Specter of Hindutva: Anticolonial Militancy and the 1857 Rebellion in the Indian Imagination, investigates the processes by which the bloody 1857 Rebellion in British India became integrated, between 1857-1957, into an Indian national consciousness that also embraced Gandhi and nonviolence. Pranav is president of AAUP-Ohio State, advisor for Students for Justice in Palestine, and a longtime social justice organizer in Columbus.
Beverly Moss, “Phenomenal Women, Community Literacies, and Belonging”
Professor Beverly Moss’s scholarly work is located in community literacy studies and focuses on documenting and making visible literacy practices in African American community spaces. Her talk comes from my long-term research relationship with a Black women’s club in Columbus.
