Graphic Delhi: Narrating the Indian Emergency, 1975–1977 in Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s <i>Delhi Calm</i>

Research Interests: Modern South Asian Literature and Cinema,  Poetry and Poetics, Novel Studies,  Comics and Graphic Narratives, Political and Cultural Theory, Gender and Sexuality, Urban Writings

Preeti Singh is a literary and cultural historian of South Asia. Broadly, she is interested in  literary expressions of political and social crises at the the intersection of decolonization and the global cold war, political theories on authoritarianism , and the urban and environmental humanities. 

Her book project tentatively titled Postcolonial Exceptions: Cultural Lives of the Indian National Emergency (1975-1977)  examines literary and cultural representations of the widely memorialized national emergency declared by Indian prime-minister Indira Gandhi on June 25, 1975. Reading across a range of genres—  novels, theatre, cinema, and political cartoons, Postcolonial Exceptions, scripts a literary and cultural history of postindependence India through the prism of the Emergency. 

Dr. Singh completed her M.A. and M. Phil degrees at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India where she wrote a dissertation on urban form and postcolonial subjectivity in the emerging genre of the Indian graphic novel. Before coming to Duke, she was an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow at Dartmouth College. She has also taught at the University of Delhi and the Ohio State University- Columbus, OH. 

Her research has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of Philosophy and Global Affairs, South Asian Review,  International Journal of Comic Art, Journal of Drama Studies, Strange Horizons, and Raiot Magazine.