Dr. Vinod Kottayil Kalidasan

Brought up in the Wayanad district of Kerala, Vinod Kottayil Kalidasan’s M.Phil. and PhD research, conducted at the Centre for English Studies (CES), the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), investigates ideas intensely connected to the multi-cultural, multi-religious and multi-lingual pasts of the Malabar region in Kerala. While his M.Phil. dissertation studies the performative narratives of the Adivasis of Wayanad, his PhD thesis is a study of the evolution of the literary, cultural, legal and political discourses and counter-discourses during and after the colonial era.

He is a passionate teacher and has taught English literature at universities across India for more than 12 years in different capacities and at many levels. The institutions he taught at include the central universities of Rajasthan and Kerala and many Delhi University colleges such as Maharaja Agrasen College, St. Stephen’s College, Dyal Singh College and Miranda House. He has also presented papers as invited speaker and chaired sessions in academic conferences in India and abroad.

He is interested in multi-disciplinary research and has published, taught and researched on a number of diverse areas of study. He is interested in the cultural and political history of Malabar, Malayalam literature, Post-structuralist thought and the questions of language. His publications include: “Routes of Pepper: Colonial Discourses around the Spice-trade in Malabar” in Kerala Modernity: Ideas Spaces and Practices in Transition (eds. Satheese Chandra Bose and Shiju Sam Varughese, Orient Blackswan, 2015 – a research project of the Kerala Modernity Studies Collective in which he is a member), “A King Lost and Found: Revisiting the Popular and the Tribal Myths of Mahabali from Kerala” (Studies in South Asian Film & Media, 2016) and “Learning to Live with Specters: Hauntology, Memory and Language in Specters of Marx” in Philosophy, Language and the Political: Re-evaluating Poststructuralism (eds. Franson Manjali and Marc Crepon, Aakar, 2017). He writes frequently for online platforms such as The Wire. His forthcoming book looks at the multiple voices in the epoch-making event of the Malabar migration.