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Nicole Thiara

Nicole Thiara

Senior Lecturer

School of Arts & Humanities

Staff Group(s)
English, Linguistics and Philosophy

Role

Dr Nicole Thiara is Senior Lecturer in English literature. Her research interests are in the field of postcolonial studies and South Asian literature, in particular Dalit and Adivasi literature.She welcomes applications to supervise doctoral candidates in any field related to her research specialisms.

She is Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded Research Network 'Writing, Analysing, Translating Dalit Literature' and its Follow-on Grant for Impact and Engagement 'On Page and on Stage: Celebrating Dalit and Adivasi Literatures and Performing Arts' (Co-Investigator DrJudith Misrahi-Barak, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France).

Nicole Thiara is co-director of the Postcolonial Studies Centre and welcomes applications for centre membership from staff and students in all disciplines at NTU, and associate membership from those undertaking relevant research or practice outside the university.

She teaches postcolonial literature and theory and is the module convener of the third-year module Postcolonial Texts and the English Dissertation module.

Career overview

After completing her PhD at the University of Manchester, Dr Thiara taught at the University of Manchester, the Manchester Metropolitan University, Liverpool Hope University and Keele University. She joined NTU in 2012.

Research areas

Nicole Thiara’s research focuses on Dalit and Adivasi literature and the representation of caste and the experience of marginalisation in South Asian and diasporic literature. Her current book project explores the concept of modernity in Dalit literature.

Her publications include Salman Rushdie and Indian Historiography: Writing the Nation into Being (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and, with Judith Misrahi-Barak and K. Satyanarayana, the edited collection Dalit Text: Aesthetics and Politics Re-imagined (Routledge, 2019) and the special issue on Dalit Literature in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature 54 (1), March 2019.

Current and previous doctoral project supervisions:

Neeraj Bunkar, Caste and Rajasthan-based Cinema: Depiction of Dalit Realities in the Cinematic World.

Purnachandra Naik, Reading the Rejected: Dirt, Spatiality and Subjectivity in Dalit Literature.

Roxie Ablett, Collector, Curator, Creator: Nigerian Folktales and their Colonial Appropriation, Feminist Intervention, and Contemporary Re-appropriation.

Karmanye Thadani, Indian Cinema as a Soft Power Tool:  Its Role in Shaping Perceptions about India Internationally.

Daniel Bilton, Dalit Literature in the 21st Century: Activism and Literary Experimentation in Modern India, completed in 2021.

Sofia Aatkar, ‘Strangers to these shores; strangers to themselves’: an Exploration of Caribbean Travel Writing, completed in 2020.

Sponsors and collaborators

  • British Centre of Literary Translation, University of East Anglia
  • Centre for Dalit Studies and English Department, Delhi University
  • Centre for New Writing, University of Leicester
  • Erbacce Press
  • Hyderabad Literary Festival
  • International Association for Performing Arts and Research (IAPAR), Pune
  • India-Indonesia Program, Hebrew University Jerusalem
  • New Art Exchange, Nottingham
  • Nottingham Contemporary
  • Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature
  • Paris libraries Médiathèque Hélène Berr, Médiathèque Françoise Sagan and Bibliothèque Marguerite Audoux
  • Research centre EMMA, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3
  • Savitribai Phule Pune University
  • Tilted Axis Press

Publications

Nicole Thiara’s principal publications include:

  • Dalit Text: Aesthetics and Politics Re-imagined (Routledge, 2019), co-edited with Judith Misrahi-Barak and K. Satyanarayana.
  • Special issue on Dalit literature in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature 54 (1) March 2019, edited with Dr Judith Misrahi-Barak and Prof. K. Satyanarayana.
  • ‘The Colonial Carnivalesque in Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable and Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 52: 6 (2016), pp. 659-71.
  • ‘Subaltern Experimental Writing: Dalit Literature in Dialogue with the World’, Ariel 47:1-2 (2016), pp. 253-80.
  • With Annapurna Waughray, ‘Challenging Caste Discrimination with Literature and Law: An Interdisciplinary Study of British Dalit Writing’, Contemporary South Asia 21:2 (June 2013), pp. 116-32.
  • ‘Enabling Spaces and the Architecture of Hybridity in Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature 46:3 (Sept. 2011), pp. 415-31.
  • Salman Rushdie and Indian Historiography. Writing the Nation into Being (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

See all of Nicole W. Thiara's publications...

Press expertise

  • Postcolonial Literature
  • World Literature
  • Dalit Literature

Course(s) I teach on