The academic research at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages in Oxford offers me a platform to develop a profound understanding of several complex phenomena of our post-modern world and their thematisation in contemporary German literature. My objectives are1) to understand the hybrid, multidirectional, polyphonic, and intricate realities associated with a migrant existence, which has become commonplace in today’s world of shifting borders and transforming realities i.e. the literary representation of life on the continuous move across nations, languages, cultures, social codes, values, and norms. 2) to understand the human response to suffering and pain under extreme circumstances such as war, genocide, expulsion, and deracination. I am intrigued by the fact how an overwhelming degree of pain translates into varying forms of trauma and accompanies an individual throughout the course of their life, making a bygone past an inevitable part of their present. The question of trauma is inextricably linked with my cardinal research interest: memory in the literature. 3) Apart from contemplating the intricacies of individual memory, I am interested in exploring various forms of memory at the collective level, for instance, the cultural and communicative memories and their thematisation, problematisation, and representation in the contemporary German-language literature.

Most importantly, while investigating the above-mentioned thematic concerns, I aim to delve into the creation of a literary text as a construct or as an aesthetic artifact i.e. the question how do writers take their clues from a diverse range of available impressions of the material reality and create their narrative world, which in turn plays a role in shaping the structures of our multifaceted world. My D.Phil. project brings these diverse research interests together, in which I explore a specific wave of migrant writing in German-literature called an ‘Eastern Turn’ or the ‘Eastern expansion of German literature’ and study the intersection between memory, migration, and aesthetics in the selected primary texts.

I am working under the supervision of Prof. Karen Jane Leeder. Before coming to Oxford, I have studied German literature at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and learned the basics of German language and grammar at Bansathali Vidyapith. Furthermore, I also attended the University of Education, Weingarten, the University of Wuppertal, and the University of Freiburg as a guest scholar. My research at Oxford is supported by the Clarendon Fund (Oxford University Press and Partners).

Apart from being passionate about literature and the associated academic research, I pursue a diverse range of recreational activities including cooking, photography, painting, gardening, running, exercising, and socialising.