Priyamvada Gopal

Priyamvada Gopal (born 1968) is an Indian-born academic, writer and public intellectual who is Professor of Postcolonial Studies in the Faculty of English 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)''.'' Her work on Indian writing in English and expertise in colonial and postcolonial literature are recognised at universities worldwide. Her third book, ''Insurgent Empire'', was shortlisted for the 2020 Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding.

She is also active on social media. Her remarks about race and empire have gained media attention and condemnation.Race review chief Tony Sewell compared to Joseph Goebbels in social media abuse
The Times 2-Apr-2021 In 2021, she was named one of the world's top 50 thinkers by '' Prospect'' magazine.

Biography

Early life

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 but is a vocal critic of the caste system.

Education and career

Gopal received a BA in English from the University of Delhi in 1989 and an MA in Linguistics from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) 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 and Cornell University in 1996. She eventually gravitated toward postcolonial studies, completing a PhD in colonial and postcolonial literature at Cornell University 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 and remained there until 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.

Work

As a literary critic, Gopal explores a range of issues and ideas, with a focus on race, empire, and decolonisation.

Empire

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.

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.

Gopal has also written about the historical amnesia surrounding empire and called for a more honest account of how Britain came to be what it is today. She argues that developing a demanding relationship to history is essential to understanding the formative and shaping nature of the imperial project on British life.

BBC Radio 4: ''Start the Week''

In 2006, Gopal took part in a debate on BBC Radio 4's ''Start the Week''. In the segment, historian Niall Ferguson argued that the British Empire was, by and large, a benevolent and virtuous enterprise. Gopal challenged Ferguson's account, questioning his assertions about the greatness of empire. The programme became a matter of controversy. That evening, the BBC
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