Prof. Aishwarya Iyer

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 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, will be published by Sublunary Editions in the US & Canada in 2023 and by Copper Coin in the rest of the world in 2022. 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, Berfrois, and Poetry at Sangam, among others. Her drawings have appeared or are forthcoming in Ligeia Magazine, RIC Journal, Guftugu, Aainanagar and as book cover art. She was the recipient of the Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize in 2015. She is currently working on a book of short fiction.

Her reading and teaching interests span ancient Greek tragedy, modern drama, continental philosophy, critical theory, Indian literatures and poetry.

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.