CENTRE FOR MEMORY STUDIES

 




HSB 241-C, Department of Humanities & Social Sciences
Indian Institute of Technology Madras
memorystudies@smail.iitm.ac.in
91 44 2257 5516

Soham is currently studying the early fiction of the author J. M. Coetzee through the lenses of affect theory, food studies, and animal studies to locate discursive-literary strategies in the novels that work to undo the Eurocentric hegemonies of the settler colonial state in South Africa and its acts of boundary formations, in pursuit of alternative embodied experiences of the fullness of human being.

Catherine’s research focuses on the transition from nationalist to regionalist discourse in modern Tamil Nadu in the 1940s and 1950s, through a reading of the popular literature and film of that era, with particular focus on the ‘fictions of memory’ that are circulated within a culture, as it attempts to define itself through the discourses of modernity. 

Research Interests: Representations of Disease in Literature, Contemporary British Fiction, Shakespeare Studies, Continental Philosophy, Czech Literature, Graphic Novels, Critical Theory. Current Area of Research: A study of how metaphors of the various connotations of "contagion" is represented in literary works from the nineteenth century to the present day.

Currently pursuing PGDM at IIM Ahmedabad

Kritika researches on illness, embodiment, memory, and post humanism, focusing on events and their effect on the everyday lives of bodies.

Rashi researches on Postraumatic conditions in Vietnam War Fiction (1970-2015)

The doctoral project aims to deconstruct what constitutes the memories of terrorism in the Indian context by decoding affective elements and multidirectional remembrance patterns in the life writings of witness communities of terrorist attacks in the country. The project will engage in a discourse analysis of communicative memory constellations associated with the event, the trauma and its intergenerational nature  and the dynamics of forgetting as reflected in the testimonial writings available in print and digitally. 

Geethapriya researches on memory and post humanism 

Nishtha's doctoral project examines erasure and loss as global form in contemporary novels by Elena Ferrante, Geetanjali Shree, Olga Tokarczuk, Ali Smith and Rachel Cusk. The project studies on one hand the figurations of melancholy and nostalgia as affective features in constructions of collective memory and amnesia, and “constellationality” as the emergent feature of the contemporary global novel on the other. 
 

Pratishtha researches on memory and identity

Gayathri researches on memory and Indian Ocean Tsunami narratives

Vignesh's doctoral project historiographically engages with narratives on the city of Chennai through the lenses of urban studies and memory studies, and tries to locate the implications of urban changes throughout its pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial history on the memory of the city, while also trying to view the city as a palimpsest, and both study and visualise the findings of the research through the tools of digital humanities.