Shivani Arulalan Pillai

Thesis Title: 'The Great Rose of the Past': Memory, Ruins, and Empires in Indian and Turkish Literature, 1970s - Present. 

Supervisors: Professor Pablo Mukherjee (Faculty of English) & Professor Laurent Mignon (Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies). 

Doctoral Research: My doctoral thesis interrogates the overlaps between memory, ruins, and the legacies of former empires through a comparative study of the writers Rohinton Mistry, Orhan Pamuk, Kiran Desai, and Leylâ Erbil. The arguments this thesis makes are two-fold. First, that in their writings, ruins emerge as animated sites that anchor living memories, on the anvil of which the legacies of the Empire-to-Republic transition in India and Türkiye continue to be shaped, thereby enabling, to borrow Jan Assmann’s formulation, a mnemohistorical reading of the past “as it is remembered” (9), shifting the thrust from the 'event' itself to its ‘afterlives.’ In so doing, this thesis positions literary languages, genres, and voice as effective inroads into arraying and questioning the myriad vicissitudes of the many afterlives of the past.  

Research Interests: Postcolonial and World Literatures, Cultural Memory Studies, Literatures in Translation, Modern and Contemporary Literature. I also maintain an interest in the geopolitical histories of India, Türkiye, and the post-Soviet states from the 1980s to the present. 

Teaching: I have experience teaching modern and contemporary literature, comparative literature, world literatures, and cultural memory studies. I have taught on the Visiting Student Programme at Worcester College, the English Faculty's UNIQ Programme, and the MSt in Comparative Literature and Critical Translation (CLCT). I am open to teaching papers and supervising dissertations on literature from the 1900s onwards. 

Public Engagement and Other Activities: From January to December 2024, I co-convened 'Ars Memoriae,' a TORCH critical thinking community, and I currently co-convene the OCCT Discussion Group. I am also a Weekend Library Assistant at the Bodleian Social Science Library. When time permits, I research and write case studies for the Institute of Historical Justice and Reconciliation (IHJR) & EuroClio's Contested Histories project.

I can be found on LinkedIn.