Ankhi Mukherjee

Ankhi Mukherjee 

Professor of English and World Literatures  

Affiliation: Faculty of English
Expert in: Cities and migration, Postcolonial literary studies
Geographic focus:  Global

While her first monograph, Aesthetic Hysteria: The Great Neurosis in Victorian Melodrama and Contemporary Fiction (Routledge, 2007), drew largely on Victorian literature and culture, Ankhi’s second book, What Is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon (Stanford, 2013) asks how classics emanate from postcolonial histories and societies. Exploring definitive trends in twentieth- and twenty-first century English and Anglophone literature, she examines the relevance of the question of the classic for the global politics of identifying and perpetuating so-called core texts. Emergent canons are scrutinized in the context of the wider cultural phenomena of book prizes, the translation and distribution of world literatures, and multimedia adaptations of world classics. The book's ambitious historical schema includes South Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the West Indies, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and North America.

Ankhi’s third book, Unseen City: The Psychic Lives of the Urban Poor is an interdisciplinary study of the relationship between global cities, poverty, and psychoanalysis across three continents. An experimental work of literary and cultural criticism, it examines fictional representations of poverty in relation to each city's psychoanalytic and psychiatric culture. The causal relationship between precarity and mental illness is explored through clinical case studies, the product of extensive collaborations and knowledge-sharing with community psychotherapeutic initiatives in six global cities. Unseen City argues that a humanistic understanding of the lives of the dispossessed is key to an adapted psychoanalysis for the poor, and that seeking equity of the psychoanalytic unconscious is key to poverty alleviation. It was published by Cambridge University Press in 2021.

Ankhi has co-edited, with Laura Marcus, a Blackwell Concise Companion to Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Culture (2014), which showcases new work by leading critics in the field of literary psychoanalysis, and edited After Lacan, a collection of essays on the intellectual and cultural legacies of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (2018). She is co-editing with Ato Quayson (Stanford University) a collaborative volume titled Decolonizing the English Literary Curriculum, which will be published by Cambridge UP with an initial run of 25,000 copies. She is also under contract to write the OUP Very Short Introduction to Postcolonial Literature.