Dr. Niyati Sharma

Dr. Niyati Sharma received her PhD in English from the University of Oxford in 2019. Her PhD thesis focuses on race and psychology in late nineteenth century popular fiction from Britain and South Asia (dealing with authors such as Edward Bulwer Lytton, Marie Corelli, Grant Allen, Florence Marryat, and Devkinandan Khatri). Her research explores how popular writers read the hypnotic encounter between racially different individuals as a site for imagining complex modes of mentally relating to the racial ‘other.’ The thesis is also concerned with British and Indian authors’ representation and theorization of the psychology of reading and its relationship with socio-political identity. Bringing together a range of insights from discourses such as Victorian fiction, Postcolonial theory, theories of cosmopolitanism, affect theory, and histories of reading, the thesis makes an original intervention in the field.

Niyati took her BA, MA and MPhil in English from Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi University before moving to Oxford for her PhD. She has previously been the recipient of the Felix Scholarship and several research grants for her research on popular fiction across Britain and India. She has extensively taught at Delhi University and University of Oxford.

In her next project, Niyati proposes to examine the intricacies of reading processes in colonial South Asia—not merely the sales and circulations of books but how were books read—in particular, the psychic impact of reading on the North Indian Hindi/Urdu speaking self