Penn Arts & Sciences Logo

Ania Loomba

Catherine Bryson Professor of English

Fisher-Bennett Hall 242
215-898-6326

Office Hours

Spring 2020

By appointment. 

 

Ania Loomba received her BA (Hons.), M. A., and M. Phil. degrees from the University of Delhi, India, and her Ph. D. from the University of Sussex, UK. She researches and teaches early modern literature, histories of race and colonialism, postcolonial studies, feminist theory, and contemporary Indian literature and culture. She currently holds the Catherine Bryson Chair in the English department. She is also faculty in Comparative Literature, South Asian Studies, and Women's Studies, and her courses are regularly cross-listed with these programs.

Her writings include Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (Manchester University Press; 1989; Oxford University Press, 1992) Colonialism/ Postcolonialism (Routledge, 1998; second edition, 2005; third edition 2015; Italian, Turkish, Japanese, Swedish and Indonesian editions) and Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (Oxford University Press, 2002). She has co-edited Post-colonial Shakespeares (Routledge, 1998); Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (Duke University Press, 2005), Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion (Palgrave, 2007) and South Asian Feminisms (co-edited with Ritty A. Lukose, Duke University Press, 2012) [http://southasianfeminisms.wordpress.com]. She is series editor (with David Johnson of the Open University, UK) of Postcolonial Literary Studies (Edinburgh University Press). She has also produced a critical edition of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra (Norton, 2011) [http://books.wwnorton.com/books/Antony-and-Cleopatra]

Her recent publications include Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies: Gender, Race and Sexuality (co-edited with Melissa Sanchez; Routledge, 2016) [https://www.routledge.com/Rethinking-Feminism-in-Early-Modern-Studies-Gender-Race-and-Sexuality/Loomba-Sanchez/p/book/9781472421753]; essays on early modern global contact; on race and embodiment; caste and its implications for understanding racial philosophies, and race in modern India. 

Her latest monograph, Revolutionary Desires: women, communism, and feminism in India (Routledge 2018), [https://www.routledge.com/Revolutionary-Desires-Women-Communism-and-Femi... the lives and subjectivities of militant-nationalistand communist women in India, from the late 1920s, shortly after the communist movement took root, to the 1960s, when it fractured. It traces their personal and political experiences through a wide range of writings—memoirs, autobiographies, novels, Party documents, and interviews—to show how they questioned, and were constrained by, the gendered norms of Indian political culture. Her latest edited collection  is A Cultural History of Western Empires in the Renaissance (Bloomsbury, 2018).

Publications

News & Events

Doctoral Dissertations Chaired

2023

David Buchanan "Global Domesticities: The Family Drama and the Capitalist World-Economy"

2022

Rovel Sequeira "The Nation and its Deviants: Global Sexology and the Racial Grammar of Sex in Colonial India, 1870-1950"

2020

Meghan E. Hall "Out of Compass: English Women's Writing and the Cultures of Travel, 1604-1680"

2016

Monika Bhagat-Kennedy "Imagining Bharat: Romance, Heroism, and Hindu Nationalism in the Bengali Novel, 1880-1920"

2013

Ashley L. Cohen "The Global Indies: Reading the Imaginative Geography of British Empire, 1763-1871"

2011

Poulomi Saha ""Revolutionary Desires: Gender and National Attachment in Colonial and Postcolonial Bengal""

Courses Taught

fall 2024

ENGL 0039.401 Narrative Across Cultures  
ENGL 5415.401 Orientalisms  

fall 2023

ENGL 0039.401 Narrative Across Cultures  

spring 2023

fall 2022

ENGL 0039.401 Narratives Across Cultures  
ENGL 2405.401 Global Feminisms  

fall 2021

ENGL 103.401 Narrative Across Cultures  

spring 2021

ENGL 103.401 Narrative Across Cultures  

fall 2020

spring 2020

spring 2019

ENGL 031.401 The Global Renaissance  
ENGL 705.401 Race, Across Time and Space  

fall 2018

ENGL 293.401 Narrative Across Cultures  
ENGL 294.401 Global Feminisms  
ENGL 769.401 Postcolonial Feminisms  

spring 2018

ENGL 294.401 Global Feminisms  
ENGL 769.401 Feminisms and Postcolonialities canceled  

fall 2017

ENGL 031.001 The Global Renaissance  
ENGL 103.401 Narrative Across Cultures  

spring 2017

ENGL 031.001 The Global Renaissance  
ENGL 103.401 Narrative Across Cultures  

fall 2016

ENGL 296.401 Global Feminism  

fall 2015

ENGL 103.401 Narrative Across Cultures  

spring 2015

ENGL 294.401 Global Feminisms  

fall 2014

ENGL 103.402 Narrative Across Cultures  

fall 2013

ENGL 103.402 Narrative Across Cultures  

spring 2013

fall 2012

spring 2012

ENGL 101.401 Shakespeare and Film  
ENGL 800.301 Pedagogy  

fall 2011

ENGL 395.401 Theater and the World  

spring 2011

ENGL 093.401 Postcolonial Literature  
ENGL 231.301 Renaissance Drama  

fall 2010

ENGL 769.401 Postcolonial Feminisms  

spring 2009

ENGL 101.001 Shakespeare  
ENGL 800.301 Pedagogy  

fall 2008

ENGL 016.402 Literature and Empire  

spring 2008

ENGL 800.301 Pedagogy  

fall 2007

ENGL 231.301 Shakespeare and Empire  

spring 2006

fall 2005

spring 2005

ENGL 231.301 Shakespeare and Empire  
ENGL 595.401 The Question of Empire  

spring 2004

ENGL 293.401 Engendering the Nation  

fall 2003

spring 2003

ENGL 293.301 Engendering the Nation