Dr Aliya Ram, Peterhouse

ar616@cam.ac.uk

 

Biographical Information

I am a Junior Research Fellow at Peterhouse College, on leave from the University of California, Los Angeles where I work as an Assistant Professor in the English Department. I received my PhD in Comparative Literature, with a joint degree fellowship in the Interdisciplinary Humanities, from Princeton University in May 2025. Prior to graduate school, I worked for five years as a news reporter at the Financial Times, where my writing on technology was shortlisted for the British Press Awards and the British Journalism Awards. I have published translations and on translation and also write fiction and poetry that is represented by the Creative Artists Agency in London. I began my academic life as an undergraduate student of English Literature at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. 

Research Interests

My research focuses on the relationships between social coercion and aesthetic innovation in comparative contexts. I am currently working on two book projects: the first on literary address, and the second on the emergence of the refugee as an exemplary narrator. The first project is based on my dissertation, titled Torn // and new: Literary Address and the Reinvention of Ambiguity. It offers the first sustained study of the ethical, political, and philosophical implications of literary address beyond the canon of lyric poetry where it has typically been discussed. The second builds on my research into performative language, particularly the operations of opacity, ambiguity, and misdirection, to argue that the shift from statelessness to persecution as the definitional characteristic of the refugee in 1951 raises questions of narrative credibility, social identity, cultural difference, styles of storytelling, and legal audience that can only be answered using the tools of literary analysis. I work primarily with materials in English, Hindi, Urdu, and French from South Asia, the Caribbean, Britain, and the United States. I also read Spanish and Chinese and take a global, multilingual, and comparative approach to my research.

Selected Publications

Ram, Aliya and Meher Ali, eds. Horizontal Translation: An Experiment with South Asian Literature. Bloomsbury Academic: Literatures, Cultures, Translation series. Under contract.

Ram, Aliya. "Qui et quels nous sommes? The Poetics of Address in Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal and Edward Kamau Brathwaite's The Arrivants.” English Literary History 92, no. 1 (2025): 33-64.

Ram, Aliya, trans. Decolonial Pluriversalism, eds. Zahra Ali and Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024).

Ram, Aliya. Review of The Idea of Indian Literature: Gender, Genre, and Comparative Method, by Preetha Mani. Comparative Literature Studies 60, no. 3 (2023): 610-613. 

Ram, Aliya. Review of The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan. Critical Inquiry 49.1 (Autumn 2022): 137-138.