Amateur Creativity: Contemporary Literature and the Digital Publishing Scene

Aarthi Vadde works in the field of 20th-21st century Global Anglophone literature, and is broadly interested in the relationship of literary history to emerging technologies and internet culture. Her forthcoming book We the Platform: How the Internet Changed Twenty-First Century Literature (Columbia UP, 2026) fills a gap in literary and computing history by showing how ideas about literature shape the Web and how Web-based literacies shape authorship, narrative form, and craft in twenty-first century literary fiction. Her book offers the first crowd-based account of literariness in a world of exponentially growing written expression.  In addition to her authorial work, Vadde is co-editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol F: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries and co-founder of Novel Dialogue a podcast about how novels are made - and what to make of them.

Past projects: Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism beyond Europe, 1914-2016 was published by Columbia UP in 2016 and won the ACLA's 2018 Harry Levin Prize for outstanding first book in the field of comparative literature.  A forum on the book was convened by The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry.  Chimeras illustrates how modernist and contemporary writers from Rabindranath Tagore to Zadie Smith reimagine the nation and internationalism in a period defined by globalization. An interview related to the book is available here.

Vadde is co-editor of a volume on the history of literary criticism entitled The Critic as Amateur (Bloomsbury Academic 2019).  Read the intro here. She is also the co-editor of an open-access cluster of essays entitled Web 2.0 and Literary Criticism (Post45 Contemporaries) and the Palgrave Handbook of 20th and 21st Century Literature and Science.

She joined Duke in 2011 after completing a postdoctoral fellowship in the English Department at Harvard University.