Sri Basu

Picture of Sri Basu
Assistant Professor, English
School of Humanities
Affiliate Faculty, Culture and Theory
University of California, Irvine
143 Krieger Hall
Irvine, CA 92697
Research Interests
18th- and 19th-Century American, African American Studies, Anglophone, Postcolonial, and Diasporic, Critical Theory
Research Abstract
My research areas include eighteenth- and nineteenth- century Anglophone Atlantic Literatures, Black Atlantic Studies, and Labor History. My current book project, The Anti-Robinsonade: Slaves, Criminals and Servants in the Early Anglophone Atlantic, reads Black Atlantic literature alongside penal history and the histories of slavery and abolition in the long eighteenth century, and offers a new account of how extra-economic violence racialized New World labor.
Publications
“Flaming Madras handkerchiefs and calico blazing with crimson and scarlet flowers”: Antebellum World Systems in Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative. Nineteenth Century Studies 3 November 2023; 35 33–53. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/ninecentstud.35.0033
The Diseased Body Politic of Early America in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, MELUS, Volume 46, Issue 4, Winter 2021, Pages 162–185, https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlac012
“The Aestheticization of Politics: The Case of Lynching Photographs,” Modernism/Modernity Print Plus, https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/basu-aestheticization-politics-case-lynching-photographs
“Reading Los Angeles’ Urban Uprisings: From Watts to Rodney King.” Modern Language Studies 48, no. 2 (2019): 56–69. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45387695.
Grants
Historical Society of Pennsylvania Robert L. McNeil Jr. Fellowship, 2023
Rare Book School, University of Virginia and the American Antiquarian Society, 2023
UCI Office of Inclusive Excellence Career Development Award, 2021
UF Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, Mellon Intersections Doctoral Research Grant, 2019-2020
Dissertation Fellowship, Charles Vincent and Heidi Cole McLaughlin Endowment, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Florida, 2019-20
Professional Societies
C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists
American Studies Association
Modern Language Association
Last updated
03/24/2024