Kaushik Ramu is Assistant Professor - Literary and Cultural Studies at FLAME University. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature & Critical Theory from The University of Pennsylvania, USA, where he was a Mellon Fellow, a Benjamin Franklin Fellow, and a Penn Program in the Environmental Humanities Fellow, after which he taught at Colorado College, USA. His interests span World Literature, Literary Theory, Modernism, Indian Aesthetics, and the Environmental Humanities. His current book-project dwells on anachronism in South Asian and South African fiction from the long twentieth century, and on how literary performances of slowness, naïveté, and aphasia can speak to critical ideas of agency. Earlier, Kaushik studied business at IIM Bangalore, worked in enterprise sales and global outsourcing, and experimented with small-scale projects concerned with education for sustainability. 

Conference Talks

• ‘Slowing Inquilaab: the Outside of Marxist Agency’, in ‘Postcolonial Cripness as Method’, Modern Language Association (MLA), San Francisco, January 2023 [forthcoming]


• ‘On Unclassifiability’, in ‘Beyond Extinction: Species, Metaphor, Language’, American Society for Literature and the Environment (ASLE), University of California Davis,  June 2019


• ‘Can the Fossil Speak?’, at ‘Timepieces’, annual conference of the Comparative Literature department, University of Toronto, March 2019


• ‘Pterodactyls in a Neoliberal Sky’, in ‘Can the Animal Speak?’, American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), Georgetown University, Washington DC, March 2019


• ‘This is not the Time: Marxism, Cold War, Forest-Spirits’, in ‘Post-45 vs. The World: Global Perspectives on the Contemporary’, Northeast Modern Language Association, Washington D.C., March 2019 


• ‘Clown in the Metro: G. V. Desani and the Anglophone Gesture’, in ‘Cosmopolitanisms from Below’, American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), University of California, Los Angeles, March 2018


• ‘In the Mood for Negation: Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Four Theses’, in ‘Comparatively Perfect’, Modern Language Association (MLA), New York City, January 2018 


• ‘Liberal Inhumanism: E. M. Forster and the Twentieth-Century Prehistoric’, in ‘Cosmopolitanisms’, American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), Utrecht, the Netherlands, July 2017


• ‘Hatterring English: A Weak Theory of the Anglophone Novel’, in ‘English and Englishness in Anglophone Literature’, Northeast Modern Language Association, Baltimore, March 2017


• ‘Fossil-Time and Subaltern Hypermodernity’, in ‘Ecocriticism and Postcolonialism’, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA), Hartford, Connecticut, March 2016


• ‘Anterior Futurities and the Literary Simple’, the British Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies Conference (BCPCS), Savannah, Georgia, February 2016 


• ‘Time-Reform, Colonial Science and Nervous Observers: Two Case Studies’, in ‘Everyday Enchantments: Beyond Disenchantment’s Critical Horizon’, 37th Annual Susman Graduate Student Conference, History Department, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, April 2015