Simona Sawhney | Humanities & Social Sciences

Simona Sawhney

Simona Sawhney
Professor
Literature
CV Summary: 
I received my PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Irvine, where I wrote my PhD dissertation under the supervision of Professor J. Hillis Miller. I taught in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and in the Department of Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Minnesota before coming to IIT Delhi. At present I am most interested in learning and thinking at the intersections of literary, political and psychoanalytic theory. I teach courses on Indian literature, literary theory, feminist theory, and political theory.

Contact Information

Room 402C, Block 2
Address: Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, MS 610
IIT Delhi, Hauz Khas, New Delhi 110016
Email: ssawhney@hss.iitd.ac.in

Publications

BOOKS:

Yashpal: On Gender and Revolutionary Thought , Orient BlackSwan, 2025, co-edited with Kama Maclean.

Dada Comrade (An English Translation of Yashpal's 1941 Hindi Novel), Penguin, 2021.

The Modernity of Sanskrit, University of Minnesota Press and Permanent Black, 2009

SELECTED ARTICLES:

“Bhagat Singh: Sacrifice, Suffering and the Tradition of the Oppressed.” Love and Revolution in the Twentieth Century Colonial and Postcolonial World. Ed. G. Arunima, Patricia Hayes and Premesh Lalu (Palgrave, 2021, 233-261).

“Religion and Hospitality in the Modern: Thinking with Abdul Bismillah” Exploring Indian Modernities Ed. Leila Choukroune and Parul Bhandari (Springer 2018, 211-230).

“Boatmen, Wastrels, and Demons: Figures of Literature” CounterText (Special Issue), 4.1 (2018): 30–56 DOI: 10.3366/count.2018.0115

“End Notes” Cultural Critique (Special Issue: The State of Things) 94 (2016): 213-223.

“Samvad: Sanskrit ki aadhunikta” [Dialogue: The Modernity of Sanskrit] (with Radhavallabh Tripathi) Pratiman, 2013, 1:2, 866-874

“Death in Three Scenes of Recitation” Postcolonial Studies (Special Issue: Reading the Revolutionaries) 16:2 (2013): 202-215.

"The Mark of the Political in Shekhar ek Jivani" in Hindi Modernism: Rethinking Agyeya and His Times, Proceedings of the Berkeley Symposium, February 11-13, 2011, ed. Vasudha Dalmia (Berkeley: Center of South Asia Studies, and Manohar Publications, Delhi, 2012.)

“Bhagat Singh: A Politics of Death and Hope.” Punjab Reconsidered: History, Culture and Practice, co-edited Farina Mir and Anshu Malhotra (Oxford University Press, February, 2012).

“Ethics and The Writing of Experience: Kalidasa in the Work of Mohan Rakesh,” Journal of Contemporary Thought (India) 14 (2001): 41-53.

"Satanic Choices: Poetry and Prophecy in Our Times," Twentieth Century Literature 45:3 (1999): 253-277.

“Gods, Heroes, and Epic Translations.” The Canadian Review of Comparative Literature (March 1999): 81-93.

REVIEWS:

“Caste and the Resistance of Theatre,” A review of Brahma Prakash, Body on the Barricades: Life, Art, and Resistance in Contemporary India, Economic and Political Weekly, 58:48, December 2, 2023

“Sexed in, and Cast(e) out of, the City” A review of Vasudha Dalmia, Fiction as History, The Book Review, Volume XLIII Number 5, May 2019

“Nikhil Govind, Between Love and Freedom: The Revolutionary in the Hindi Novel (2014)” Indian Economic and Social History Review, 52, 3 (2015): 400-404