Ananya Jahanara Kabir FBA is Professor of English Literature at King’s College London. Her research spans creolisation across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, critical philology and the relationship between literary texts, embodied cultural expressions and memory work. Between 2013-2018, she directed the ERC Advanced Grant funded project, ‘Modern Moves’, which investigated the history and global popularity of African diasporic social dances. Her current theoretical explorations of ‘Alegropolitics’ and ‘creolisation’ flowed out of that project. Kabir is the author of Paradise, Death and Doomsday in Anglo-Saxon Literature (2002), Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir (2009) and Partition’s Post-Amnesias: 1947, 1971 and Modern South Asia (2013). During 2022-23, Kabir was awarded a British Academy/Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship to write a new book, Alegropolitics: Creolising Connection on the Afromodern Dancefloor. From January to July 2024, she will take up a Faculty Fellowship at the Global Cultures Institute, King’s College London, to develop her new project, ‘Fort Creole’. Kabir has been awarded India’s Infosys Prize in the Humanities and Germany’s Humboldt Research Prize. In July 2023, she was elected as Fellow of the British Academy in their Cultures, Media and Performance section.

Research project EXC Temporal Communities Fellowship:

Milman Parry’s Peripheral Time: Balkan Epic, Oral-Formulaic Theory and Anglo-Saxon Studies (November 2023)