Biography

Aishwarya Iyer was raised in India and Bahrain, and studied English Literature at the universities of Mumbai and Jadavpur, and Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to teaching at JGU, she worked as a copy editor in publishing houses in New Delhi, and as an independent researcher. Her languages include Tamil, Hindi, French and German (in varying degrees of proficiency). She conducted initial research for the Goethe-Institut project ‘Poets Translating Poets’ in 2015 involving poets from South Asia and Germany.

Her first book of poems, The Grasp of Things, is published in 2023 by Sublunary Editions in the US & Canada and by Copper Coin in the rest of the world. An earlier version of this manuscript was shortlisted for the Almost Island Manuscript Competition in 2015. Her poems, fiction and critical prose have appeared in journals such as The Bombay Literary Magazine, Humanities Underground, Almost Island, Muse India, ASAP Art, Firmament, Berfrois, and Poetry at Sangam, among others. Her drawings have appeared in Ligeia Magazine, RIC Journal, Guftugu, The Needle Magazine, Aainanagar and as book cover art. She has exhibited her paintings at a group exhibition in Delhi in 2023. She was the recipient of the Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize in 2015. She is currently working on a book of short fiction.

Apart from teaching courses at JGU, she is part of an advanced non-credit philosophy reading group comprising faculty and students, where texts by Heidegger, Derrida, Kierkegaard, Benjamin, Adorno and Kant have been pursued with equal parts curiosity and befuddlement. In the past, she has run a non-credit Philosophy and Literature reading group primarily with students. From 2018 to 2019, she was a member of The Feminist Collective, a group for women faculty and students on campus that aimed to be a safe space where pertinent issues were brought into discussion via the reading of feminist texts.