Ananya Jahanara Kabir

An MPhil (1994) in Old English (Anglo-Saxon) and Old Norse from the University of Oxford, followed by a PhD (1998) from the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge, trained her in Philology and the Old Germanic languages; her move to postcolonial approaches to Humanities scholarship allowed her to think critically about Philology's relationship with nationalism, Empire and modernity, and that relationship's repercussions on knowledge production.  Over the past decade she has worked on what she terms 'imperial medievalism', in which the philologist and the German intellectual tradition play an important part. This project sits within her wider interests in the cultural forms taken by modernity and her commitment to working with multiple languages and across disciplinary boundaries.

Some Representative Publications:

Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures, co-edited with Deanne Williams (Cambridge University Press, 2005; paperback re-issue 2010)

“Consecrated Groves: The Imperial Utility of a Tacitean Trope,” in Nicola McLelland and Christina Lee, ed., Germania Remembered (Arizona State University Press, 2012)

“Reading Between the Lines: Whitley Stokes, Scribbles and the Scholarly Apparatus,” in Elizabeth Boyle, ed., Ireland, India, England: The Tripartite Life of Whitley Stokes (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2011), pp. 78-97

 “An Enchanted Mirror for the Capitalist Self: Turning to Tacitus in British India,” in Nadia Altschul and Kathleen Davis, ed., Medievalism in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of the “Middle Ages” Outside of Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), pp. 51-79

Link to university website:
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/english/people/academic/kabir.aspx