Kaushik Ramu
Doctoral Candidate, Comparative Literature & Literary Theory
PPEH Fellow 2016-2017
2016 - 2017
Kaushik Ramu is a PhD candidate in the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, at the University of Pennsylvania. His dissertation studies the significance of inhuman timescales – as in fossils, extinction and drifting continents – in the shaping of a planetary commons, in its selection of twentieth-century novels and earth-scientific archives; in this, it speaks to debates across ecocriticism, postcolonial studies and disability studies. Among his broad questions are how humanist turns to concepts like ‘species’ or ‘planet’ negotiate their own political risks, how literary form has related to mental difference, and what the life-worlds of anything from the deep sea might be like.