Dr Anandi Rao

Anandi Rao is Lecturer in South Asian Studies in the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics.

Anandi received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Irvine following an MA in Literary Translation from the University of East Anglia and an undergraduate degree from the University of Edinburgh. Prior to joining SOAS she was at NYU Shanghai.

Her research lies at the intersection of South Asian Studies, gender and sexuality studies, postcolonial studies and translation studies. Her work has been published in South Asian Review, Studies in South Asian Film and Media, Shakespeare Bulletin and an edited volume on Romeo and Juliet published by Arden Bloomsbury. She is currently working on an article for the volume Translating Shakespeare: Access and Mediation that looks at the question of translation through a disability justice lens.

She is also working on a short book project titled Hindi Shakespeare in Colonial India that looks at how three men who were involved, in varying degrees, in the movements to make Hindi a national language also translated Shakespeare. Why did they choose the particular texts they chose? How did the politics of their time impact their translations? What does close reading their work tell us about translation and adaptation as conceptual categories in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in India.

Other projects include work on graphic novels, critical disability studies, and cultural manifestations of nationalisms.

South Asian literature and film, translation, postcolonial theory, gender and sexuality studies