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Priyamvada Gopal
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Priyamvada Gopal
Priyamvada Gopal (born 1968) is an Indian-born academic, writer and activist who is Professor of Postcolonial Studies at the University of Cambridge. Her primary teaching and research interests are in colonial and postcolonial studies, South Asian literature, critical race studies, and the politics and cultures of empire and globalisation. She has written three books engaging these subjects: Literary Radicalism in India (2005), The Indian English Novel (2009) and Insurgent Empire (2019).
Gopal's work has appeared in several newspapers and online publications, and she has contributed occasionally to radio and television programmes in Britain and elsewhere. Her remarks about race and empire have gained media attention and both praise and condemnation. In 2021, she was named one of the world's top 50 thinkers by Prospect magazine.
Gopal was born in Delhi, India. The daughter of an Indian diplomat, she spent her childhood in India, Sri Lanka and Bhutan, and attended an international high school in Vienna, where her father served as a diplomat in the mid-1980s. She is from a Brahmin family; she is a critic of the caste system.
Gopal received a BA in English from the University of Delhi in 1989 and an MA in Linguistics from Jawaharlal Nehru University in 1991. After finishing her studies in India, she moved to the United States to pursue graduate studies in English. She received an MA in English from Purdue University in 1993. She continued her postgraduate work at Cornell University, earning an MA in English in 1996 and a PhD in colonial and postcolonial literature in 2000.
She began her teaching career as a graduate instructor in the Department of English at Cornell University in 1995. She joined Connecticut College in 1999 as an Assistant Professor of English leaving in 2000. She moved to the University of Cambridge in 2001, where she is professor of Postcolonial Studies in the Faculty of English and a teaching fellow at Churchill College. She supervises and teaches in the areas of literary criticism, modern tragedy, 19th-century and modern British literature, and postcolonial and related literatures. Her primary interests are in colonial and postcolonial literatures, with related interests in British and American literatures, the novel, translation, gender and feminism, Marxism and critical theory, and the politics and cultures of empire and globalisation. From 2006 to 2010, she was Dean of Churchill College.
She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2024.
Gopal has written extensively about the impact of empire on contemporary culture in Britain and examined its broader social and cultural effects in South Asia and other former colonial societies. According to Gopal, her motivation to speak about issues of empire and colonialism started with a disagreement with historian Niall Ferguson about the British Empire, on a 2006 edition of BBC Radio 4's Start the Week.
In her book Insurgent Empire, Gopal examines traditions of dissent on the question of empire and shows how rebellions and resistance in the colonies influenced British critics of empire in a process she calls "reverse tutelage". She argues that ideas of freedom, justice, and common humanity had themselves taken shape in the struggle against imperialism.
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Priyamvada Gopal
Priyamvada Gopal (born 1968) is an Indian-born academic, writer and activist who is Professor of Postcolonial Studies at the University of Cambridge. Her primary teaching and research interests are in colonial and postcolonial studies, South Asian literature, critical race studies, and the politics and cultures of empire and globalisation. She has written three books engaging these subjects: Literary Radicalism in India (2005), The Indian English Novel (2009) and Insurgent Empire (2019).
Gopal's work has appeared in several newspapers and online publications, and she has contributed occasionally to radio and television programmes in Britain and elsewhere. Her remarks about race and empire have gained media attention and both praise and condemnation. In 2021, she was named one of the world's top 50 thinkers by Prospect magazine.
Gopal was born in Delhi, India. The daughter of an Indian diplomat, she spent her childhood in India, Sri Lanka and Bhutan, and attended an international high school in Vienna, where her father served as a diplomat in the mid-1980s. She is from a Brahmin family; she is a critic of the caste system.
Gopal received a BA in English from the University of Delhi in 1989 and an MA in Linguistics from Jawaharlal Nehru University in 1991. After finishing her studies in India, she moved to the United States to pursue graduate studies in English. She received an MA in English from Purdue University in 1993. She continued her postgraduate work at Cornell University, earning an MA in English in 1996 and a PhD in colonial and postcolonial literature in 2000.
She began her teaching career as a graduate instructor in the Department of English at Cornell University in 1995. She joined Connecticut College in 1999 as an Assistant Professor of English leaving in 2000. She moved to the University of Cambridge in 2001, where she is professor of Postcolonial Studies in the Faculty of English and a teaching fellow at Churchill College. She supervises and teaches in the areas of literary criticism, modern tragedy, 19th-century and modern British literature, and postcolonial and related literatures. Her primary interests are in colonial and postcolonial literatures, with related interests in British and American literatures, the novel, translation, gender and feminism, Marxism and critical theory, and the politics and cultures of empire and globalisation. From 2006 to 2010, she was Dean of Churchill College.
She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2024.
Gopal has written extensively about the impact of empire on contemporary culture in Britain and examined its broader social and cultural effects in South Asia and other former colonial societies. According to Gopal, her motivation to speak about issues of empire and colonialism started with a disagreement with historian Niall Ferguson about the British Empire, on a 2006 edition of BBC Radio 4's Start the Week.
In her book Insurgent Empire, Gopal examines traditions of dissent on the question of empire and shows how rebellions and resistance in the colonies influenced British critics of empire in a process she calls "reverse tutelage". She argues that ideas of freedom, justice, and common humanity had themselves taken shape in the struggle against imperialism.
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